Galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916
| Galaxy | listing of all galaxies
|
 Galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916 is seen as a tiny dot in this photo of distant galaxies. Image courtesy of ESO. Abell 1835 IR1916 (also known as Abell 1835, Galaxy Abell 1835, or Galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916) was a candidate to be the farthest galaxy ever observed. It was discovered by French and Swiss astronomers of the European Southern Observatory, namely Roser Pelló, Johan Richard, Jean-François Le Borgne, Daniel Schaerer, and Jean-Paul Kneib. The astronomers used a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope to detect the galaxy. Other observatories were needed to make an image of it possible. The Observatory, in conjunction with the Swiss National Science Foundation, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Astronomy and Astrophysics, issued a news release on 1 March 2004 announcing the discovery.
Further analysis by Weatherley et al. (2004) of data that leaded to the first announcement seemed to debunk the claim that this was a distant galaxy. Deeper follow-up observations in the H-band using the Gemini North Telescope did not observe the galaxy anymore (Bremer et al. 2004)
The galaxy was supposed to be 13.2 billion light years away from the Earth, in the Virgo constellation. This means that humans would have observed Abell 1835 IR1916 as it was 13.2 billion years ago, only 500 million years after the Big Bang is thought to have occurred. The candidate galaxy lied behind the galaxy cluster Abell 1835, and was supposed to be gravitationally lensed by the massive cluster in order to be observable.
References
- "Astronomy & Astrophysics" (A&A, volume 428 page L29-L32;Reanalysis of the spectrum of the z = 10 galaxy (http://esoads.eso.org/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2004A%26A...428L..29W&db_key=AST&high=419c4ceb2e22137) by Weatherley, S. J.; Warren, S. J.; Babbedge, T. S. R.
- "The Astrophysical Journal" (ApJ, Volume 615, Issue 1, pp. L1-L4; Gemini H-Band Imaging of the Field of a z = 10 Candidate (http://esoads.eso.org/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2004ApJ...615L...1B&db_key=AST&high=419c4ceb2e07873) by Bremer, M. N.; Jensen, Joseph B.; Lehnert, M. D.; Schreiber, N. M. Förster; Douglas, Laura)
|
