I got back from AAS early Friday morning and crashed for a couple of days. The Atlanta meeting was really quite a hoot. I had not attended a AAS meeting since summer of 2002 in Albuquerque, so it was a great chance to get caught up with all my friends in the community, as well as the latest Big Astronomy (or, as my friend Jim Kaler and I like to refer to it sometimes: Big-Ass Tro). I Fedexed a bunch of press releases and books back to myself, and will likely mine that info for the next few weeks as blogging material. But, it seems to me that there was an underlying theme in this year’s results — maybe it wasn’t intended, but it stood out to me: We’re Finding Things Aren’t Quite What We Expected. Not only is this true of stars and planets and galaxies, but also out at the “limits of the observable universe” where we should be seeing some of the youngest structures in the cosmos.

What does this mean? Did we misunderstand something? Is the timeline of the cosmos all wrong? Are things different out at 13 billion years ago? Is there a problem? As it turns out, not really.

We saw several press releases regarding deep-sky surveys looking at galaxies and objects as they appeared when the universe was maybe 2-3 billion years old. Astronomers expect to see (and in fact, DO see) galaxies in spiral shapes, galaxies in the process of assembly, and so on. But, in at least two surveys (that were discussed at press conferences), what they’re also seeing are highly-evolved elliptical galaxies — ovoids are the likely result of two or more galaxies colliding and commingling. The gravitational forces and interactions reshape the galaxies and you ultimately get these elliptical things. It takes a while, and if it does take billions of years, then maybe the universe is older than we think, or maybe some of these collisions don’t take as long as we think. Or there are some other factors that we need to account for in our calculations and theories about events in the young universe.

This is one of those interesting problems that our advanced telescopes and detectors are delivering frequently enough that we now sit here and scratch our heads for a little while before we plunge into the task of explaining why things look as they do. The theories are probably fine in general, but they likely need a little tweaking in the details. And that’s cool because that’s what science does best: it takes observations and use them to strengthen theories that explain the cosmos around us.