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Previous Next Up Topic Cosmology / Alternative Cosmology / Lyman-alpha blob (3127 hits)
By Jade Annand Date 2009-04-23 20:38
Reported on the BBC News site:

The article said:

It is a "Lyman-alpha blob" and is 55,000 light years across - as large as present-day galaxies.

Though younger such blobs have been found, "Himiko" confounds the idea that such large objects grew more recently by the merger of smaller ones.


COLOUR... US... SURPRISED.

(Yes, we spell colour that way up here :)

One other little snippet I thought was interesting is where pervasive observational bias creeps in when the community's tools are limited:

The article said:

"We hesitated to spend our precious telescope time by taking spectra of this weird candidate," Dr Ouchi said.

"We never believed that this bright and large source was a real distant object."


I, for one, am glad Ouchi-sensei took the chance. What else have we been missing out there?
By Ari Jokimäki Date 2009-04-24 08:45
They mention a problem with mass, but it puzzles me how they found out the mass of the object (I couldn't find the paper), shouldn't you have something like a group of objects or at least a pair before you can determine their masses?
By Jade Annand Date 2009-04-24 16:35
The preprint is here.

It looks like they are doing the mass estimation based on the spectral energy distribution, and get 0.9-5.0 x 1010 solar masses.
By Ari Jokimäki Date 2009-04-27 11:02
I see, thanks. :)
Previous Next Up Topic Cosmology / Alternative Cosmology / Lyman-alpha blob (3127 hits)

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