Word: ryles
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...British scientist reported last week about an event that might seem unreportable: the birth of the universe. Cambridge University Radio Astronomer Martin Ryle performed the feat by taking a look at part of the universe as it existed 8 billion years...
...Ryle's findings provided new evidence in an old astronomical dispute. Astronomers agree that the universe is made of gigantic star clusters-galaxies-that are racing away from each other like the hot molecules of an exploding gas. But they do not agree why this is happening or how it started. The simplest explanation, the "evolving universe" or "big-bang" theory, is that a few billion years ago, all matter in the universe was concentrated in a relatively small volume of space. Then a vast explosion scattered the cosmic material, which formed into galaxies and fled into emptiness...
When this fact was discovered about ten years ago, Cambridge's Martin Ryle drew the obvious conclusion that colliding galaxies should be visible to radio telescopes even if they are billions of light-years beyond the maximum range of optical astronomy. So he set to building bigger and more sensitive radio telescopes...
Crowded Space. Last week Ryle reported to the Royal Astronomical Society that after carefully surveying many strips of the sky, he had come to the remarkable conclusion that colliding galaxies get more crowded in space as they get farther away. Those that are 8 billion light-years away occur eleven times as thickly as those near the earth. If pairs of colliding galaxies are closer together at that distance, Ryle reasoned, noncolliding galaxies, which are 100 million times more numerous, must be closer together...
...Says Ryle: "If most of the radio stars are in fact collisions between galaxies, such encounters apparently are considerably more frequent in distant space (perhaps billions of light-years away) than near us. This disparity would argue against the steady-state hypothesis that the density of matter in space remains constant. The radio signals we are now receiving from distant collisions started on their way billions of years ago. If the evolutionary theory is correct, the universe should have been denser then, and encounters between galaxies more likely...