Recent news from The Johns Hopkins University
This section contains regularly updated highlights of the news from around The Johns Hopkins
University. Links to the complete news reports from the nine schools,
the Applied Physics Laboratory and other centers and institutes are to
the left, as are links to help news media contact the Johns Hopkins
communications offices.
With the combined power of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team of astronomers led by Wei Zheng of The Johns Hopkins University has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light of the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old. The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called “Dark Ages.” During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy accordingly opens up a window into the deepest, remotest epochs of cosmic history.
“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Zheng, a principal research scientist in The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of a new paper appearing in Nature tomorrow. “Future work involving this galaxy – as well as others like it that we hope to find – will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the Dark Ages ended.”
September 19, 2012 Tags: California Institute of Technology, CLASH, Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey, gravitational lensing, Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, Holland Ford, Hubble Space Telescope, Infrared Array Camera, IRAC, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, most distant galaxy, Spitzer Space Telescope, Wie Zheng
| Category: Academic Disciplines, Homewood Campus News, Physics and Astronomy, University-Related
Marc Kamionkowski, considered one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists for his work in large-scale structures and the early history of the universe, will join the faculty in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences on July 1. An endowed professor at California Institute of Technology, Kamionkowski has spent much of his career researching astrophysics, cosmology and elementary particle theory.
June 27, 2011 Tags: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, American Astronomical Society, American Physical Society, astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Caltech, Daniel Reich, galaxy formation, gravitational lensing, Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Marc Kamionkowski, particle dark matter, phase transitions in the early universe, stellar astrophysics, the epoch of reionization, The Johns Hopkins University, The Robinson Professor of Theoretical Physics
| Category: Academic Disciplines, Homewood Campus News, Physics and Astronomy