“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. …” (Ps 19:1-4, ESV)

There is a dim blue arc in the distant night sky. It’s subtle gleam is testimony to both the majesty of the universe and the inadequacy of man to comprehend it.

“When I first saw it, I kept staring at it, thinking it would go away,” said study leader Anthony Gonzalez of the University of Florida in Gainesville.¹

While using Hubble Space Telescope to investigate an old galaxy cluster first discovered by the Spitzer space telescope, astronomers discovered this mind blowing abnormality. The faint blue arc is the light from a distant galaxy cluster behind the extremely old galaxy cluster they were studying. Why is this of so great a concern? Because finding a galaxy cluster that is this well formed, this size, and this “old” simply does not fit the Big Bang cosmological model. It presses hard against the outer limits of what the current model will allow for the age of the universe and its development (see What Happens If The Universe Is Too Old?). Weighing in at 5 to 10 times the size of any other galaxy cluster observed at this distance, it is simply too large and too old to exist.

“When I first saw it, I kept staring at it, thinking it would go away,” said study leader Anthony Gonzalez of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “According to a statistical analysis, arcs should be extremely rare at that distance. At that early epoch, the expectation is that there are not enough galaxies behind the cluster bright enough to be seen, even if they were ‘lensed’ or distorted by the cluster. The other problem is that galaxy clusters become less massive the farther back in time you go. So it’s more difficult to find a cluster with enough mass to be a good lens for gravitationally bending the light from a distant galaxy.”²

So is this discovery just rare or impossible?

The astronomers who spotted the blue arc calculated that the odds of finding such a massive galaxy so distant in the universe are practically nil: “For the observed magnitudes we expect to find no arcs over the entire sky as bright,” the team writes in one of three papers outlining their findings, published online in The Astrophysical Journal June 26.³

Once again, the Big Bang model will be tweeked and amended to account for this aberration from the norm. The lingering question stands: As we continue to find “old” objects in the sky that defy the outer limits of the age of the universe, at what point should we question the entire system of the Big Bang model? At what point should we ask if the apparent age of these objects might be merely that — an appearance? Or do we prefer to simply stare at the evidence until it goes away.

“When I first saw it, I kept staring at it, thinking it would go away,” said study leader Anthony Gonzalez of the University of Florida in Gainesville.¹

So will a great many others I suspect …

REFERENCES:

1. NASA’s Hubble Spots Rare Gravitational Arc from Distant, Hefty Galaxy Cluster NASA. Web. 27 June 2012. [↩] [↩]
2. (NASA’s Hubble Spots Rare Gravitational Arc from Distant, Hefty Galaxy Cluster NASA. Web. 27 June 2012. [↩]
3. Mann, Adam. Astronomers Discover Galaxy They Thought Couldn’t Exist. Wired.com. Web. 27 June 2012. [↩]