September 20, 2020
The same gravity that holds galaxies together and keeps planets in their orbits also held you to the Earth on the day you were born.
Breaking Distant Light
Birthday · September 20, 2020
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published September 20, 2020. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
In the distant universe, time appears to run slowly. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshifted), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe. Featured, the light from distant galaxies has been broken up into its constituent colors (spectra), allowing astronomers to measure the cosmological redshift of known spectral lines. The novelty of the featured image is that the distance to hundreds of galaxies can be measured from a single frame, in this case one taken by the Visible MultiObject Spectrograph (VIMOS) operating at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile. Analyzing the space distribution of distant objects will allow insight into when and how stars and galaxies formed, clustered, and evolved in the early universe.