Universe Aged Quickly

The most recent issue of physnews has some interesting information about the formation of the early universe. Apparently, new data shows that after "only" three billion years or so, the universe already looked surprisingly old. The standard model of universe formation has trouble explaining these results.

LARGE GALAXIES FORMED SURPRISINGLY EARLY, a new study finds. You'd expect that a census of the farthest, earliest galaxies would feature a lot of smaller, hotter, younger, bluer galaxies, perhaps in the act of smashing into and coalescing with their neighbors. But a new survey made using the 8-meter Hawaii telescope of the Gemini Observatory shows rather that at only a comparatively short time after the big bang the universe was already well furnished with large, reddish, mature elliptical galaxies. The Gemini Deep Deep Survey (GDDS) trawled the poorly patrolled "Redshift Desert" region of cosmic history, the epoch roughly 3 to 6 billion years since the big bang and found instead what team member Roberto Abraham (University of Toronto) calls a "Redshift Dessert"---plenty of massive old galaxies where you'd expect few. Abraham and his colleagues reported the results at this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Atlanta.

Patrick McCarthy (Carnegie Institution) said that what the survey shows is that at a point only 4 billion years into the life of the universe there were already galaxies up to 3 billion years old. This leaves very little time for the assembly of something as big as an elliptical galaxy. Furthermore, the galaxies in the survey possess a plentiful stock of heavier "metal" atoms, the kind that would have to be cooked up in repeated cycles of star birth and supernova. To put the question in term of galaxy demographics: how could there be so many senior citizens so early? According to Roberto Abraham, all of this should make theorists sweat.
(www.gemini.edu/gdds/)

LARGE SCALE STRUCTURES IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE are also larger than expected. Like the presence of surprisingly early mature galaxies at a redshift of about 2 (see the item above) another result at the AAS meeting suggests that the standard cosmological model---or at least that part of it devoted to galaxy formation---is in need of revision. A group of astronomers using the Blanco Telescope of the Inter-American Observatory in Chile and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia reported seeing a grouping of 37 galaxies, all at a redshift close to 2.38, spread 300 million light years across the sky. Povilas Palunas (University of Texas) said that this constitutes the largest observed structure in the distant universe. According to models that simulate how the hot diffuse matter of the infant cosmos distilled into a web of knots and filaments, such an immense agglomeration should not have arisen so quickly.

The statistical case for saying that this sampling of bright galaxies (fainter galaxies could not be seen) is truly a coherent structure and not just a chance juxtaposition can be expressed as a probability with 1000-to-1 odds, a likelihood obtained by looking not at the specific arrangement of galaxies themselves but at the daunting amount of void between the galaxies. Gerard Williger (Johns Hopkins) said that he and his colleagues would naturally like next to sample adjoining volumes of deep space in order to test the proposition that the hasty filimentation of matter seen in this initial data set (the observed galaxies lie in the southern constellation "Grus") is not an isolated incident
(www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/filament.html).

My personal belief (completely unfounded on any scientific theory whatsoever), is that there's something intrinsic to the laws of physics that causes them to be infinitely complex. In other words, the set of laws required to explain the nature of the universe is infinite, and cannot be encoded in any finite-length program. I also think that after we discover enough levels of physical reality (relativity -> mechanics -> molecules -> atoms -> quarks -> strings?), we will realize that there is also an overall structure to the physical laws themselves -- a meta-meta-level, as it were.

It seems to me that these new results support my belief in infinite complexity -- even if you go back to the very beginning of time, there will be pattern and structure and history at every possible scale.

Posted on January 9, 2004 06:48 PM
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