Cosmic HyperEvolution --"Early Galaxies of Universe Harbored Potential for Planets & Life"

 

                                     

The case for highly evoloved advanced technological civilizations billions of years older than Earth-based humans just grew stronger according to new research from the Niels Bohr Institute. All objects in the image are distant galaxies - not stars. Early galaxies from the infancy of the Universe more than 12 billion years ago evolved much more quickly than previously thought, new research shows. This means that already in the early history of the Universe, there was potential for planet formation and life. 

For several thousand years after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe consisted of a hot, dense primordial soup of gases and particles. But the Universe was expanding rapidly and the primordial soup became less dense and cooled. However, the primordial soup was not evenly distributed, but was denser in some areas than others. The density in some of the densest areas increased due to gravity and began to contract, forming the first stars and galaxies. This took place approximately 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The earliest galaxies were probably comprised of primitive, giant stars that consisted of only hydrogen and helium. There were no heavier elements. They first appeared later in the evolution of the Universe, created by nuclear processes in the stars.

Researchers have studied 10 galaxies in the early universe by using quasars as light sources. In order to use quasars as light sources the quasar has to lie behind the galaxy you want to observe. By looking at the light from the distant quasar (A) that shines through the galaxy (B) on its way to Earth, researchers can determine which elements the galaxy contains from the light that is absorbed. This is seen as lines in the spectrum of the quasar.

 

                      

A star is a giant ball of glowing gas that produces energy by fusing hydrogen and helium into heavier and heavier elements. When no more energy can be extracted the star dies and massive clouds of dust and gas are flung out into space. These large clouds are condensed and recycled into new stars in a gigantic cosmic cycle. The new stars that are formed will have a higher content of heavier elements than the previous and for each generation of star formation there are more and more of the heavy elements and metals. And heavy elements (especially carbon and oxygen) are necessary for the formation of planets and life, as we know it.

The image below is from the Nordic Optical Telescope of one of the quasars researchers have looked at. After having removed the quasar light from the image, the distant galaxy appears, which is indicated by an arrow in the image to the right. They discovered that the galaxies from the very early universe had a surprisingly large quantity of heavy elements. Credit: Nordic Optical Telescope.

 

                     

Up until now, researchers thought that it had taken billions of years for stars to form and with that, galaxies with a high content of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. But new research from the Niels Bohr Institute shows that this process went surprisingly quickly in some galaxies.

"We have studied 10 galaxies in the early Universe and analysed their light spectra. We are observing light from the galaxies that has been on a 10-12 billion year journey to Earth, so we see the galaxies as they were then. Our expectation was that they would be relatively primitive and poor in heavier elements, but we discovered somewhat to our surprise that the gas in some of the galaxies and thus the stars in them had a very high content of heavier elements. The gas was just as enriched as our own Sun," explains Professor Johan Fynbo from the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

The galaxies are so far away that you normally do not have the opportunity to observe them directly, but the researchers have used a special method.

"There are some extreme objects in the Universe called quasars. Quasars are gigantic black holes that are active and when matter falls into them, they emit light that is as strong as thousands of galaxies. They are like a kind of lighthouse that lights up in the Universe and can be seen very far away," explains Jens-Kristian Krogager, PhD student at the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University Copenhagen. He explains that in order to use quasars as light sources the quasar must lie behind the galaxy you want to observe.

Astrophysicist Jens-Kristian Krogager explains about baby galaxies from the young universe more than 12 billion years ago evolved faster than previously thought. This means that already in the early history of the universe, there was potential for planet formation and life. 

"We then look at the light from the quasar and can see that some light is missing. The missing quasar light in the image has been absorbed by the chemical elements in the galaxy in front of it. By analysing the spectral lines we can see which elements there are and by measuring the strength of each line we can see the amount of the elements," explains Jens-Kristian Krogager.

They discovered not only that the galaxies from the very early Universe had a surprisingly large quantity of heavier elements, but also that one of the galaxies in particular was especially interesting.
"For one of the galaxies, we observed the outer regions and here there was also a high element content. This suggests that large parts of the galaxy are enriched with a high content of heavier elements and that means that already in the early history of the Universe there was potential for planet formation and life," says Johan Fynbo.

More information: Article in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters - http://onlinelibra … 2.x/abstract

The Daily Galaxy via University of Copenhagen and Royal Astronomical Society 

Image Credit: Lorena Fuentealba Cosmic cycle

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Comments

[MarionScott]

I love the fact that we humans are curious by nature and that drive will eventually lead to the discovery of life bearing planets.

[maillot football]

Hoewel ik liever zou hebben als je ging naar een beetje meer detail, heb ik nog steeds de kern van wat je bedoelde. Ik ben het eens met het. Het is misschien niet een populair idee, maar is het zinvol. Zal zeker nog eens terug voor meer van dit. Grote work.Good werk, prachtige blog ... veel plezier in en voegde het in mijn sociale bookmarks. Blijf op het goede werk

[Cumhur Karahan]

So, we will observe their huge engeneering projects, but we will guess this is a natural stuff. But we will not able to explain how can be there. Till we will accept the event is not natural. So, do you know any candidate event that we try to explain as a natural event but looks like weird?

I suspected this event: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/water-masers-galactic-geysers-observed-spewing-clouds-of-water-at-100s-of-kilometers-per-second.html

But we must be carefull against Percival Lowell -like errors on Mars.

[Zordon]

Why are people still clinging on to the primitive "big bang theory" ? All the evidence found in the last decade does nothing but aid the disapproval of this theory. It says above the primitive galaxies contain high amounts of heavier elements, so the process must have been a lot quicker than previously predicted. When will they accept the fact this theory is old news, and the universe has been around a lot longer than 13.7 billion years.

[john]

Zordon the great may be right. If the processes that we think
create the heavier elements take a certain amount of time then..
the universe must be older. There is also more mass that we can't see in all the galaxies which is why they spin and stay together instaed of flying apart. The early estimates of the
amount of matter in the universe are drastically low.

[Bob Greenwade]

Zordon does have a good point here. There's clearly something wrong with the way we've been determining ages, distances, and other data that we've used to establish Big Bang and many other theories that the scientific community has been taking for granted. Warps in space and time are certainly possible, as is the idea that we live in some sort of "cosmic bubble," but I think it would be prudent to also look closely at our methods and check them for critical errors.

[George Botha]

Quoted from Wikipedia:

Eric J. Lerner (b. 1947) is an American popular science writer, independent plasma researcher,[2] and serves as the president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc.[3] He authored the 1991 book The Big Bang Never Happened, which advocates Hannes Alfvén's alternative to the dominant Big Bang theory, Plasma Cosmology.

As an alternative to the Big Bang, Lerner adopted Alfvén's model of plasma cosmology that relied on plasma physics to explain most, if not all, cosmological observations by appealing to electromagnetic forces.[5] Adopting an eternal universe, Lerner's explanation of cosmological evolution relied on a model of thermodynamics based on the work of the Nobel Chemistry prize winner Ilya Prigogine under which order emerges out of chaos.[18][5] This is in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Lerner asserts that away from equilibrium order can spontaneously form by taking advantage of energy flows, as argued more recently by Eric Chaisson, an American astrophysicist.[19]

While there was favorable reaction from non-experts to Lerner's book,[23] physical cosmologists who have commented on the book have generally criticized it.[20][22][24][25][26][27] In particular, Edward L. Wright, the American astrophysicist and cosmologist, was critical of Lerner for making errors of fact and interpretation and criticized specifics of Lerner's alternative cosmology,[21] claiming that:

1) Lerner's alternative model for Hubble's Law is dynamically unstable
2) the number density of distant radio sources falsifies Lerner's explanation for the cosmic microwave background
3) Lerner's explanation that the helium abundance is due to stellar nucleosynthesis fails because of the small observed abundance of heavier elements

Lerner has disputed Wright's critique.[28]

End of quote from Wikipedia.

Lerner's was one of the first comprehensive efforts to describe in detail an alternative to the Big Bang model of cosmology. His book came shortly after the landmark study on the apparent expansion of the universe by Paul LaViolette. In his study, LaViolette found that the stationary universe tired-light model consistently fit the data better than the big bang expanding universe model. LaViolette's study was published in the Astrophysical Journal in 1986 under the title "Is the Universe Really Expanding?" Genesis of the Cosmos by Paul LaViolette gives an exposition of the continuous creation cosmology and critique of the big bang theory.

LaViolette’s theory of “subquantum kinetics” makes an impressive 12 apriori physics and cosmology predictions which have all apparently thus far been verified (read the book).

These are examples of the growing schools of thought out there still rejected by the scientific mainstream.

Quoted again from Wikipedia:

Hawking's singularity theorem is for the whole universe, and works backwards-in-time: in Hawking's original formulation, it guaranteed that the Big Bang has infinite density. Hawking later revised his position in A Brief History of Time (1988) where he stated "There was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe" (p50). This revision followed from quantum mechanics, in which general relativity must break down at times less than the Planck time. Hence general relativity cannot be used to show a singularity.

End of quote from Wikipedia.

Hawking revised his guarantee of infinite Big Bang density. Hawking said there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe. Hawking came close to questioning the very concept of a beginning of the universe.

Of course the cosmological models have their analogies in religion. The Christian God is obviously relied upon to provide the Big Bang, whereas the continuous creation model seems natural to the Hindu or Buddhist mind.

Old habits die hard, Zordon. What once neatly explained a whole bunch of cosmological observations is now largely discredited. But the process will not be complete until the scientific community develops a comprehensive, well-defined alternative to the Big Bang, which describes and explains most if not all of the cosmological phenomena currently observed by means of continuously improving technology.

The good thing that comes out of the clinging to the Big Bang theory is that, as all the science that is currently being performed in a desperate effort to prop up the Big Bang theory eventually fails, it inadvertently provides support for the alternative, whatever the future dominant cosmological theory might be called.

[smartypants]

Its a shame that so many people will have to die off and make room for other minds before any alternative ideas could blossom. But then the old ones wont feel the shame of their closed minds I guess. To have so much time and money invested into a theory that was wrong from conception.I wonder how it would feel to go from top news maker to forgotten in a week or so because something that someone during their entire life said to be "impossible" suddenly was proven true beyond doubt and they just couldnt make it fit into their models. The good news is we are beginning to see farther than ever before. Next will be clearer (which is still part of farther I guess). We might see new ideas being accepted much sooner. Get ready Ivar. Schools all over might be looking to hire you soon!

[Keith Rowley]

Does anyone remember the Fermi paradox? I think the universe sterile on the basis of current evidence. I'm tired of hearing that 'life must be abundant' with no proof at all - just hypotheses and unscientific philosophically based assertions - which sound ever more desperate. And Fermi's question bears serious consideration.
I don't think we even know what life is yet. Still, the sheer magnificence of seeing so deeply into the past of our universe takes my breath away.