Is the Hubble Telescope Making Stuff Up?

Aug. 17, 2012 - PRLog -- Of course not. But it has spotted a galaxy that, technically speaking, shouldn’t exist. But before the End of Days stuff starts, the reason this galaxy (whimsically dubbed BX442) is so special isn’t that it’s packed with blood-thirsty aliens or on course to gobble the Milky Way in it’s hungry wake of expansion, it’s just that it’s neat and enormous.
An article in Nature (the international weekly journal of science) defines the galaxy as an incredibly rare “grand-design spiral galaxy”. This type of galaxy isn’t that rare in theory, but BX442 is the only one to be spectroscopically confirmed.
Although as findings go, this galaxy is a real humdinger! Scientists say the BX442 is so vast and perfectly formed that it shouldn’t really exist. UCLA astrophysicist, Alice Shapley, said,
"The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"
It’s estimated BX442 is about 10.7billion years old and cam into existence just 3billion years after the Big Bang. The spiral arms of a grand-design spiral galaxy are it’s real selling point, but it takes a great deal of time to organise into such a pattern. Until, it was thought 10.7billion years was nothing near enough time to achieve such a tidy, advanced structure.
But while folks in the regular world are playing on their iPods, murdering on their Xbox 360s and trying to sell iPads to find next year’s trip to Burning Man, the folks over at Hawaii’s W.M. Keck Observatory are examining the space around BX442 to figure out why the latest astronomical discovery is quite simply so very, very weird!
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