The Blob That Didn't Eat the Universe

It’s hard to resist an astronomy discovery when it’s called a blob, even if the precise name
is the Lyman-Alpha blob. In a paper being published this afternoon in Astrophysical
Journal, astronomers are announcing that they spied such an object—thought to be an
enormous body of gas that may be the precursor to a galaxy—dating from when the
universe was a mere 800 million years old. Stretching for 55,000 light years
(approximately the radius of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk), this Lyman-Alpha blob has
astronomers scratching their heads.

Named Himiko for a legendary Japanese shaman queen, the blob is not the largest such
object ever discovered. That honor goes to a Lyman-Alpha blob reported in 2006 and
thought to be the biggest object in the universe. Instead, this one is notable because it is
so far away, and in cosmic terms far away = long ago. “The farther out we look into
space, the farther we go back in time,” says astronomer Masami Ouchi of the
Observatories of the Carnegie Institution , who led the international team that made the
discovery: because light travels at a finite velocity, it takes time for light from objects in
space to reach the eyes of Earthlings or their telescopes, which means we are seeing the
blob as it was near the dawn of time, when the universe was barely 6 percent of its
current age of 13.7 billion years. That means light from Himiko has been traveling
toward us for 12.9 billion years, which is equivalent to saying we are seeing it was it was
12.9 billion years ago.

And that makes astronomers a bit uneasy. Whether the blob is ionized gas powered by a
supermassive black hole, a primordial galaxy, the collision of two young galaxies or a
single giant galaxy with a mass of 40 billion Suns—all of which are on the table— it’s
too big for its age. As Ouichi puts it, “I have never imagined that such a large object
could exist at this early stage of the universe’s history. According to . . . Big Bang
cosmology, small objects form first and then merge to produce larger systems. This blob
had a size of typical present-day galaxies when the age of the universe was about 800
million years old.” In fact, other blobs had the decency to wait to show up, appearing
when the universe was 2 to 3 billion years old. No extended blobs had been found from
when the universe was younger, until Himiko, which means astronomers need to scurry
back to the drawing boards to figure out how an object this massive managed to grow up
so fast.
Astronomy throughout History

The study of planets, stars, galaxies, and

intergalactic and interstellar space falls under the
field of astronomy. Thousands of years ago, the
earliest civilizations observed the heavens.

Because astronomers of the past set the foundation

for today's astronomy, it is an interesting journey to
take a look through the history of astronomy. How
did they figure out how big around the Earth is? Who
was the first astronomer to recognize galaxies
outside our own? What must've it been like to look
through Galileo's first telescope to see the craters on
the Moon? Were people stunned when Halley
correctly predicted the return of a comet?

Were women ever allowed or encouraged to be

astronomers in ancient times? Did the builders of
Stonehenge incorporate into its structure an eclipse
prediction system? How did the Mayan calculate the
length of a year with such accuracy without a
computer?

Galileo's "The Phases of the

Moon". You can see some of the
Moon's craters drawn in the pictures.
Galaxies

During the early 1900's, which is not very long ago, astronomers were unaware
that there were other galaxies outside our own Milky Way Galaxy. When they
saw a small fuzzy patch in the sky through their telescopes, they called it a
nebula. When examined closely, some of the nebulae had a spiral shape. So
astronomers at first called these "spiral nebulae". These nebulae were all
believed to be part of our Galaxy, our community of stars.

Edwin Hubble studied the "spiral nebulae" and found that they were composed of stars.
These nebulae were not nebulae at all, but other communities of billions of stars held
together by gravity - galaxies! Suddenly, our universe was much bigger. We realized that
our Galaxy was just one of many billions of galaxies in the universe.

Hubble studied galaxies for a very long time, and after seeing many, many galaxies, he
realized that he could put them into groups based on their shape: spirals, ellipticals, or
irregulars. His work helped us to understand that the appearance of galaxies depends on
our point of view, and on what's happening in the galaxies.
Natural resource

Natural resources (economically referred to as land or raw materials) are naturally

forming substances that are considered valuable in their relatively unmodified (natural)
form. A natural resource's value rests in the amount and extractability of the material
available, associated with it are extraction and purification, as opposed to creation. Thus,
mining, petroleum extraction, fishing, hunting, and forestry are generally considered
natural-resource industries, while agriculture is not. The term was introduced to a broad
audience by E. F. Schumacher in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful.[1] The term is defined
by the United States Geological Survey as "The Nation's natural resources include its
minerals, energy, land, water, and biota."[2]
Natural resources are mostly classified into renewable and non-renewable
resources. Sometimes resources are classified as non-renewable even if
they are technically renewable, just not easily renewed within a reasonable
amount of time, such as fossil fuels.

Non-renewable resources
Some non-renewable resources can be renewable but take an extremely long time to
renew. Fossil fuels, for example, take millions of years to form and so are not practically
considered 'renewable'. Different non-renewable resources like oil, coal, natural gas etc.
have different levels of demand from different sectors like transportation and residences
with each resource specializing for each sector. Many environmentalists propose a tax on
consumption of non renewable resources. Non-renewable resources cannot be replaced or
can only be replaced over thousands or millions of years.

Natural capital
Natural resources are natural capital converted to commodity inputs to infrastructural
capital processes.[4][5] They include soil, timber, oil, minerals, agriculture and other goods
harvested from the Earth. Both extraction of the basic resource and refining it into a
purer, directly usable form, (e.g., metals, refined oils) are generally considered natural-
resource activities, even though the latter may not necessarily occur near the former. This
process generates high profits due to the high demand for the natural resources and the
energies that they are able to generate.

A nation's natural resources often determine its wealth in the world economic system and
its diplomatic, military, and political influence. Developed nations are those which are
less dependent on natural resources for wealth, due to their greater reliance on
infrastructural capital for production. However, some see a resource curse whereby easily
obtainable natural resources could actually hurt the prospects of a national economy by
fostering political corruption. Political corruption can negatively impact the national
economy because time is spent giving bribes or other economically unproductive acts
instead of the generation of generative economic activity. This has been seen over the
years with legislation passed to appease companies who will benefit. There also tends to
be concentrations of ownership over specific plots of land that have proven to yield
natural resources.

Conservation movement
The conservation movement also known as nature conservation is a political, social
and, to some extent, scientific movement that seeks to protect natural resources including
plant and animal species as well as their habitat for the future.

The early conservation movement included fisheries and wildlife management, water,
soil conservation and sustainable forestry. The contemporary conservation movement has
broadened from the early movement's emphasis on use of sustainable yield of natural
resources and preservation of wilderness areas to include preservation of biodiversity.
Some say the conservation movement is part of the broader and more far-reaching
environmental movement, while others argue that they differ both in ideology and
practice. Chiefly in the United States, conservation is seen as differing from
environmentalism in that it aims to preserve natural resources expressly for their
continued sustainable use by humans.[1] In other parts of the world conservation is used
more broadly to include the setting aside of natural areas and the active protection of
wildlife for their inherent value, as much as for any value they may have for humans.

The High Peaks Wilderness Area in the 6,000,000-acre (24,000 km2) Adirondack Park is
a publicly-protected area located in northeast New York.