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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Astronomic Genealogy

There are a lot of different branches of genealogy I have heard about. Genetic and Forensic, for example. But I hadn't heard about the Astronomic. Apparently, though, scientists have discovered the ancestors of the Milky Way. So I'm sure the term, Astronomic Genealogy isn't too far away from being coined.

Astronomers at Rutgers and Penn State universities have discovered galaxies in the distant universe that are ancestors of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.

These ancient objects, some of the first galaxies ever to form, are being observed as they looked when the universe was a mere two billion years old. Today, scientists peg the universe’s age at 13.7 billion years, so light from these galaxies traveled almost 12 billion years to reach Earth.


You might think that Astronomic Genealogy is very different from what we do.

The astronomers discovered these galaxies as part of a five-year-old census of galaxies...


Maybe not. Though I suspect the spelling on their censuses is more uniform.

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