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by Govert Schilling 胡德良 译
| LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA—Buried in this image of a minute patch of the night sky are remote galaxies so faint (marked by diamonds, above) that it took the Hubble Space Telescope more than 100 hours to register their feeble light. Obtained last fall, the Ultra Deep Field 2012 provides astronomers with the deepest view yet of the very early universe. An analysis of the observed properties of the most distant objects, presented here on Monday at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, indicates that there must be a huge, unobserved population of even fainter galaxies. The energy of newborn stars in these primordial galaxies was responsible for heating up the cold hydrogen gas in intergalactic space, just a few hundred million years after the big bang. Astronomers expect that the future James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched in 2018, will succeed in actually imaging these faint objects, so stay tuned for an even deeper field. |
加州长滩消息：这张图片显示的是夜空中的一小片天区，其中隐藏着遥远的星系，它们非常暗淡（见上图的中菱形标志），哈勃太空望远镜花了100多个小时才发现它们那微弱的光线。这张极深空2012图是去年秋季拍下的，为天文学家们提供了宇宙最初期最为遥远的景象。对于这些最为遥远天体，天文学家们分析了所观测到的特性，并将分析资料提交到美国天文学会于星期一在这里举行的第221届会议上。分析表明，那里肯定存在一个巨大的、未被观测到的、甚至更暗的星系群。在大爆炸仅仅几千万年之后，这些原始星系中新生恒星的能量使星系际空间的低温氢气温度升高。天文学家们期望，定于2018年发射升空的未来望远镜——詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜，将会成功地实拍这些暗淡的天体，所以一直要对准更加深邃的天空。 |
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