Harvard Astronomers Discover Galaxies

A discovery by two Harvard astrophysicists of 1700 new galaxies will likely lead to a greater understanding of the age of the universe, scientists said yesterday.

Two astronomers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics--Professor of Astronomy Margaret Geller and Professor of Astronomy John Huchra--recently announced their discovery of a "Great Wall" of galaxies numbering about 1700.

Geller and Huchra, using a telescope and radio waves, determined that at 500 milion light years the Great Wall is over 5000 times larger than our own Milky Way galaxy.

"It was only through years of data that these conclusions could have been ultimately made," Huchra said. The astronomer said that when their project ends in 1992-93, he and Geller will have mapped more than 15,000 distant galaxies.

The enormous size of this newest group of galaxies, the result of a 12-year search, has precipitated excitement among astronomers concerned with determining the age of the universe.

The discovery casts the traditional age of the universe--once believed to be 15 billion years old--into doubt.

The gravity required to bring together the matter in these massive, well-defined galaxies needs to have been acting for more than 15 billion years, Huchra said.

As light years are the distance light travels in one Earth year, they are both a time and space reference and thus give clues as to the age of the "Great Wall."

Some scientists, while intrigued by the discoveries, preached caution. "Definite conclusions cannot be made," said University of California at Berkeley Professor Joseph Silk. "Although this is a significant breakthrough, we must examine different areas of the universe before we make definite conclusions, or many theories about the universe will be proven wrong prematurely."

Geller and Huchra said the next step in determining the age of the universe is to construct a national observatory containing a computerized system that would scan the skies and measure the distances of remote galaxies.

"It's very exciting," said Matthew Malcolm '77, an astronomy professor at UCLA. "When I had graduated Margaret and John were just beginning their experiments.