12-17-2017, 07:19 PM
I gave up at the point when they said:
"KCRM must be built to address the above questions[...]"
It's not a discovery, it's a proposal. I won't explain it now as the sky subtraction stuff is important but I don't know how they're doing that (sky subtraction is simply removing the effect of our own atmosphere from observations so atoms and molecules don't fool us into thinking they also exist in the object you're looking at).
"probing ionization" means they're looking for stuff in the early universe when things were so energetic they ionized all the hydrogen atoms which were pretty much most of the matter in the universe. At some point, as the universe expanded and cooled, re-ionization happened (all those electrons that were zapped from their atoms started to recombine as there was less energy around to zap them again).
Lyman alpha is simply an emission line that hydrogen emits. It's a very strong emission line and relatively easy to detect but its wavelength is in the UV. Due to an expanding universe and red-shift, Lyman-alpha emission gets shifted to red and infrared wavelengths. Because it's easy to identify, measuring that emission line is a very reliable method to measure the red-shift of a galaxy and therefore its distance.
I don't know if that makes things easier to understand but at least I know that most people on the planet have no idea what Lyman-alpha means.
"KCRM must be built to address the above questions[...]"
It's not a discovery, it's a proposal. I won't explain it now as the sky subtraction stuff is important but I don't know how they're doing that (sky subtraction is simply removing the effect of our own atmosphere from observations so atoms and molecules don't fool us into thinking they also exist in the object you're looking at).
"probing ionization" means they're looking for stuff in the early universe when things were so energetic they ionized all the hydrogen atoms which were pretty much most of the matter in the universe. At some point, as the universe expanded and cooled, re-ionization happened (all those electrons that were zapped from their atoms started to recombine as there was less energy around to zap them again).
Lyman alpha is simply an emission line that hydrogen emits. It's a very strong emission line and relatively easy to detect but its wavelength is in the UV. Due to an expanding universe and red-shift, Lyman-alpha emission gets shifted to red and infrared wavelengths. Because it's easy to identify, measuring that emission line is a very reliable method to measure the red-shift of a galaxy and therefore its distance.
I don't know if that makes things easier to understand but at least I know that most people on the planet have no idea what Lyman-alpha means.