Spitzer discovers strange new "species" of ultra-red galaxies

The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.

By Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts — Published: December 2, 2011

This artist's conception portrays four extremely red galaxies that lie almost 13 billion light-years from Earth. Discovered using the Spitzer Space Telescope, these galaxies appear to be physically associated and may be interacting. One galaxy shows signs of an active galactic nucleus, shown here as twin jets streaming out from a central black hole. David A. Aguilar (CfA)

In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new “species,” they can’t explain what makes them so ruddy.

“We’ve had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations,” said Jiasheng Huang from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Spitzer succeeded where Hubble failed because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light — light so red that it lies beyond the visible part of the spectrum. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.
MORE: http://www.astronomy.com/en/News-Observing/News/2011/12/Spitzer%20discovers%20strange%20new%20species%20of%20ultra-red%20galaxies.aspx

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