A footnote has been added to this entry.
Sometimes, I see an image, and it literally raises the hair on the back of my neck.
Take a look at this picture (click it for a higher-res version):
Doesn’t look like much, does it? Ah, but like so much in astronomy, appearances can be very deceiving.
The picture is from the Spitzer Space Telescope, an orbiting observatory sensitive to infrared light. Astronomers pointed this formidable instrument into a region of the sky in the constellation Draco, where there is a minimum of stars, galaxies, and dust to obscure any distant objects. The fact that you see so many objects in the image is a testament to how sensitive Spitzer is.
The top part of the image shows the results of a ten-hour exposure. The image is 6×12 arcminutes across, roughly a fifth by a third the size of the full Moon on the sky. Almost all the objects you see in it are stars and galaxies; the stars are in our own Milky Way Galaxy, and are relatively close, maybe a few thousand light years away. The Galaxies (which look pretty much like stars) are much farther, millions or billions of light years away.
But what you don’t see in that top image is what’s important.
In any deep image of the sky, the bright objects are of course the easiest to notice. Usually, the astronomers display the contrast in an image such that the bright things are easy to see, and anything faint is set to black. But in this case, the astronomers wanted to see the extremely faint objects. To do this, they masked out the bright objects and then upped the contrast… way up.
What pops out of the image is displayed in the bottom part of the image. The masked foreground objects are obvious enough. But what’s that fuzzy, glowing material weaving its way in the background?
According to the astronomers who took the image, most if not all of that diffuse glow comes from the very first stars ever born in the Universe.
According to current theories, after the Big bang, the material in the expanding Universe was too hot to form stars for quite some time. Finally, after about 200 million years, the gas had cooled enough that gravity’s ghostly grip could start to form clumps of matter. Before there were galaxies, before there were “normal” stars, before there were planets, before there was anything except hydrogen, helium, and just a taste of lithium, the first stars coalesced from this miasma. They were monsters, these first-generation stars, with as much as 100 times the mass of the Sun. They were short-lived, too: consuming their fuel at prodigious rates, their life span was a fraction of the Sun’s. In a few million years, maybe less, they were doomed to explode as titanic supernovae, forming black holes in their cores. Eventually, galaxies may have coalesced around those black holes, leading to normal stars, planets, and eventually us.
But during their short lives, the light those first stars emitted was blinding. That light sleeted out into the still-young Universe, traveling through space as the space itself expanded, like someone running up the down-escalator. Finally, after billions of years– billions of years after the stars themselves had blown up– the light reached Earth, falling into the waiting eye of Spitzer.
The fuzzy web of light in that bottom half of the image may be the first real ghost photo– the image of light from stars long-since dead, the very first stars ever to appear in our Universe.
That’s why I got a chill, why the hair on the nape of my neck stirred. Look at that picture again, and wonder that the light recorded in it had traveled for 13.5 billion years, 98.5% of the age of the Universe itself, across that vast and terrible gulf of space. I got a chill when I first saw the picture, but then a spread of warmth: I’m proud to be human, to be able to see this, to know that we can understand it. We all should be proud. We are the way for the Universe to know itself.
Note added morning of Nov3: As I state in this entry, the results here are not confirmed; the light might be from the first stars, or it might not be. Astronomer Ned Wright has his (strong) doubts, for example, which are stated in a CNN article. Hopefully followup data will shed more light (haha) on this.
November 2nd, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Wow, that almost blows my mind. Light from the first stars, and it is still visible. Incredible. Thanks BA!
November 2nd, 2005 at 11:35 pm
“We are the way for the Universe to know itself.”
That is real poetry, Phil.
Thank you for sharing this image and your thoughts about it.
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:02 am
Well, I dunno. I’m *glad* I’m human, but *proud*? It’s not like I’ve achieved something…
BTW, it’s a real thrill to be able to see those first stars! Seeing something that existed 13.5 billion years ago boggles the mind.
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:48 am
Wow, incredible. Just as mind-boggling as the COBE pictures. Thanks!
November 3rd, 2005 at 6:44 am
Star light, star bright
I sometimes stretch my mind by looking back a few billion years, but I'm much more comfortable in the mere most recent half billion. Those astronomers, though, go out 13.5 billion years…and come back with photos.
November 3rd, 2005 at 7:12 am
History is something that we can see.
… “In the beginning…”? Well, we know quite a bit about the beginning because we can see it.
November 3rd, 2005 at 7:12 am
What incredible good fortune- that we can see, and understand, this. What pettiness- that we still can’t live and let live on our finite speck in the universe…
November 3rd, 2005 at 7:32 am
“We are the way for the Universe to know itself.�
Or, as Kilgore Trout sez, the meaning of life is “To be the eyes / and ears / and conscience / of the Creator of the Universe / you fool”.
Sure puts a bad day in perspective, doesn’t it? I mean, no matter how badly I screw up, the Universe’s expansion will keep accelerating without me.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:15 am
Still, don’t you ever find yourself thinking, “ONLY 13.5 billion years?” Sometimes I feel like you shouldn’t be able to put an age on the universe — it’s inconceivable, really. Especially since time didn’t have much meaning in the early days/nanoseconds.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:18 am
I never ceased to be amazed by the entire scenario in which we, as humans, find ourselves as miniscule beings in this vast world. But we are slowly extending our reach and understanding beyond the limits of Earth, and I so enjoy witnessing it.
I am genuinely curious about one thing, however: How is it that this light is just now getting here? I assume that it is a radiant light that has somehow been reflected off of other matter in the universe and is just now ending its roundabout journey into human percpetion. No other explanation (e.g. the light traveling without reflection, coming straight to where Earth now stands) seems viable in my mind. Is this reasonable to believe?
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:41 am
Yes, stunningly!
Lee Smolin writes in The Life of the Cosmos that we need “a gravitaional-wave or neutrino telescope/satellite/antenna to study the Universe before it became transparent. “Gravitational radiation does provide one way of seeing all the way back to the origin of our Universe”.
“The existence of stars is thus the key to the problem of why the cosmos is hospitable to life.” Lee Smolin
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:41 am
>“We are the way for the Universe to know itself.�
>That is real poetry, Phil.
l believe Phil is qouting the master, Carl Sagan. It should perhaps read “We are but one way for the Universe to know itself.” So as not to offend the many ET’s out there.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:44 am
If you look real close, you can see the back of your head, peering into a telescope!
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:55 am
Sometimes Bill and Ted say it best.
“Woah!”
-Andy B
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:03 am
i’m proud… and sad. because a sizeable fraction of the citizens of the country who built, launched, and operate Spitzer don’t appreciate this, may never appreciate this, and some even deny the beautiful realization.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:37 am
Actually, yes, I was paraphrasing Sagan. I probably should have noted that; I don’t mean to be taking credit for someone else’s words!
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:54 am
The Early Universe
NASA photo:
November 3rd, 2005 at 11:46 am
[...] This post explains how researchers at NASA think they may have captured an image of the light from some of the first stars to have formed (13.5 billion years ago); you can even see the picture. Incredible and awe-inspring. (Original link from Pharyngula.) [...]
November 3rd, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Paul asked:
“How is it that this light is just now getting here?”
This is light coming directly from the source, not bouncing. It left the objects 13.5 billion years ago when they were much closer to us. In the mean time, space has expanded so that the light had to travel father than the original distance between the young stars and our location! (The running up a down escalator Phil mentioned.) Also, and for the same reason, The stars are presently much farther than 13.5 billion light years away.
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Even if we didn’t get the light of the first stars in that picture, it is still amazing, beautiful, and more awe-inspiring than anything anti-science can come up with. Wow. Thank you for posting such a lovely shot of our universe.
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:10 pm
The AP (as reprinted in CNN) covered the issue as well, and did a poor job of it. http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/11/02/early.stars.ap/index.html
The location that the article is set in (Wisconsin) has no bearing upon any other locations in the article (Maryland, California). They picked a random HST image of the nearby universe to show, rather than a Spitzer image of the far away universe. And they randomly decided to throw in two paragraphs at the end about a different astronomy topic.
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:19 pm
I am totally confused. How did we get ahead of the light? Why hasn’t this light already passed us? Could someone point me to a link or explain this in a little more detail? Please type slowly because I am a slow reader!
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:31 pm
David,
I think the problem is probably (it usually is, anyway) with a misconception about what it means that the universe is expanding. It does not mean that the universe id filling a void of previously empty space. It means that the space between objects (galaxies) is getting larger.
The usual analogy is to imagine galaxies as dots painted on a balloon. As the the ballon inflates, the dots are stationary, but the space between them grows, and each dot claims the other dots are moving away (when, in some sense, they are all at rest!).
So imagine a star was 10 steps away. It emits light. As the light travels toward us, space expands. So the light has to travel more than 10 steps to reach us. (In fact, if space expanded fast enough, the light might never reach us!) Well suppose it finally does reach us. It might have travelled 15 steps, even though at first it was only ten steps away. In the meantime, the star that it came from might be 25 steps away.
That is why that, although the universe is about 14 billion years old, the visible universe is much larger than 14 billion light years–it is more like 40 billion light years.
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:59 pm
toss me for getting off-topic, but i can’t believe (oh but it’s true!) that the previous comment was contributed by the same david heddle that vigorously defends intelligent design over at http://www.pandasthumb.org/. his explanation of the size of the universe here seems clear and logical, just what we want on this blog, but knowing that he’s arguing creationist nonsense elsewhere puts a bad taste in my mouth. i had to say it.
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:17 pm
dre,
I would like to clarify that I defend cosmological ID on Panda’s Thumb–cosmological ID being the idea that the universe is fine tuned. I never defend biological ID a la Behe/Dembski on Panda’s Thumb or anywhere else.
Now tha’ts all I’ll say about it because these pictures are too beautiful to argue over.
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for the explination. It helps to clear up some questions but, of course, others come to mind. I thought I was taught, a long time ago, that everything was moving away from the center? I am not sure what the center is but that is what I remember. Anyway, if we are moving out and, I make an assumption here, the big stars formed behind us (?) how does the math work? If they formed around 100 million yrs after the big bang and lasted only a few million years or so, how is that the light is hanging around for 14 billion years. Are we expanding that quickly?
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:41 pm
David,
There is no center. Think again of the balloon analogy. But force yourself to imagine that you have no concept of up or down. Your only sense of direction is along the surface of the balloon. None of the dots (galaxies) on the balloon can claim a special location, either at or near the center or an edge. Likewise, the universe has no center and no edge.
The light can still be in transit after the star has died. Anytime we see a super nova, by the time we see it the star is already “dead.”
I am not sure what you mean by the big stars forming behind else. Maybe this will help, maybe not. Those ancient stars we are seeing–they are long gone–and that region of space might now contain mature galaxies like ours. If there are any observers there, looking at us, what they will see is similar to what we are seeing–primordial stars that are the acestors of our own.
We are expanding that quickly–if fact one of the great discoveries of the last 15 years is that our rate of expansion is increasing. The sad part of that is that some remote galaxies that we now see will blink off–the light they emitted is reaching us now, but at some point it will no longer be able to reach us. (The escalator is speeding up.)
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:44 pm
I admit it: the concept of 1.35e10 years is too big for my ape brain. I suspect I’m not alone.
Is there an equivalent of the short film Powers of Ten, but for time?
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:47 pm
David Heddle used a ballon as an example to explain the expansion of the universe. I think that the bun dough with raisins expanding as it raises is a better analogy.
It doesn’t mean that I in any way condone the putting-rasins-in-buns atrocities that takes place every day, only evil people do that.
But even the bun analogy isn’t perfect, as there is no physical centre for the expansion. It is the whole universe that expands. You must imagine bun dough that wraps around itself so the outer boundaries are all touching….
… uh-oh, was that my phone? gotta go…
I’m not sure I’m the explaining this very well…
November 3rd, 2005 at 2:49 pm
David, this might help: when the Universe was a mere 100 million years old, it was probably quite a lot larger than 100 million light years across (well, if you believe in inflationary theory, anyway). Therefore, most of it was too far from where the Earth was going to end up for the light to reach our location until much later. During the intervening time, space kept on getting bigger (but, I think, at less than the speed of light). This means that, as more time passes, the size of the observable universe, in principle, gets larger. Note that this effect is separate from the expansion of the Universe, it is an effect of the time taken for light from very distant, ancient objects to reach us.
David Heddle – what’s the difference between cosmological ID and the anthropic principles?
November 3rd, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Nigel–gosh I don’t really want to start a debate so I’ll provide a definition only–and can we all agree that definitions are neutral?
In my opinion:
The weak anthropic principle (WAP) holds that the laws and constants of physics have to be compatible with complex, carbon-based life because, after all, we are here. Almost nobody disputes this. It is not quite as trivial as it sounds, because historically physics was not concerned with whether or not its laws were consistent with our existing.
Note: WAP doesn’t say that that the universe must support life. But given that it does, then the laws and constants will be what they have to be.
The strong anthropic principle (SAP) is that the universe MUST have values that, at some point, allows for complex carbon based life. According to SAP, a universe that cannot support life is out of the question. Not many people accept this.
Cosmological ID is closer tom WAP, but a little stronger. It says that not only are the laws/constants what they must be to support life, but that these same values are fine-tuned–i.e., tweak them a little and life would not exist. Now the fine tuning in and of itself is generally accepted by all. What really makes cosmological ID is the explanation for the fine tuning, namely design. Non-IDers (generally) do not dispute the fine-tuning, but seek alternative explanations–often in the form of multiverse theories.
Now folks, that is just a fair (I think) definition. Let’s not fight about it on this thread.
November 3rd, 2005 at 3:22 pm
I’m not too impressed by the evidence presented in the photograph, as pretty as it is. I’m not an astronomer and don’t claim to be, but it is pretty easy to produce similiar results by putting any picture into a photoshop program and screwing with the contrast and brightness. I certainly hope it turns out to be true, because it really would be cool if it is, but I don’t see any reason why the diffuse glow would be anything other than ambient local light brought to the front with filters, which it most likely is (occam’s razor…).
November 3rd, 2005 at 5:18 pm
The coolest part of all of this is that from the photon’s point of view, the trip took no time at all.
Oooowooooo!
November 3rd, 2005 at 7:58 pm
When I first wrote this entry, I had a line that started off, “In my opinion, some of this light may very well be due to very faint stars, galaxies, and diffuse gas and dust in our Galaxy…”, but that sounded too authoritative given that I have not actually worked with the data, nor read a paper on this particular work. So instead I just used lots of weasel words like “may be” and “might” to show that this is by no means an iron-clad discovery. But the impact of it is still visceral to me, and I wanted to write about it. If it is shown to be wrong, or further evidence comes along to support it, I’ll be sure to write about it.
November 3rd, 2005 at 7:59 pm
Kebsis,
Well, ambient light is EXACTLY what the cosmic background radiation is. Ambient = non-local, reaching the observer diffusely from uniformly distributed background sources.
The ambient light is there. It really exists in the photo regardless of its source. All that’s left to do is figure out what the source is. Cosmologists believe they have a convincingly reliable interpretation of what that source is for the microwave ratiation that is seen radiating from every direction in space, and it isn’t local. In fact, such a discovery was predicted by big bang theory even before it was found.
So, is this infrared glow also predicted by the big bang theory? As I understand Phil’s artilce the answer is, yes.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:33 pm
with all due respect to mr. heddle, as i am certain he has a much more substantial grasp of cosmology than i, creationism by any other name remains creationism. i can imagine that in the context of this thread it may be irrelevant, but since i brought up intelligent design, i should reiterate that cosmological ID is still the anthropic principle, which is still creationism. it would be a disservice on this blog to say that the laws of physics are designed for humans without acknowledging that the claim is fundamentally a religious one.
i, for one, consider fundamentally religious concepts to be fundamentally unscientific. i will admit that i am glad that you, mr. heddle, whom i admit i do not know from adam, appreciate the elegance of the actual science that you have encountered in your studies. i don’t intend an argument, but i feel that i must say what i have said.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:25 pm
Wow. Your piece here and the image just made me stop…Amazing. Both the science and your writing. Thanks.
November 3rd, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Hvp,
When I said ‘ambient light’ I wasn’t being clear. I meant ambient light from local galaxies, stars, dust, etc.
And Dr. Phil, even if it turns out to not be what it seemed at first, you wrote a very interesting article that is still quite moving and interesting.
November 4th, 2005 at 8:06 am
Hvp, what I think Kebsis is referring to is reflections off dust and such local to the stars and galaxies that have been masked out.
David Heddle, I appreciate your approach to this thread, and your definitions seem reasonable and neutral (non-advocatory).
dre, I think there is a distinction between WAP and creationism/ cosmological ID. WAP is just the recognition that we exist in a universe in which we can exist. Just like fish are good swimmers – amazing how that happens, since they live in the ocean. Cosmological ID speaks not just to the universe being compatible with our existence, but that there is a cause for that compatibility, that the universe was shaped to produce us, and the cause is, erm, some uncaused cosmic intellect engaging in purposeful design. As David Heddle said, the SAP just states that the universe must be shaped to fit our type of life, that a non-life-bearing universe can’t exist. Perhaps that forcing is from an active intelligence, or perhaps it is from some as-yet-undetermined physical laws of the makeup of the universe. In other words, perhaps the interrelations between the cosmological constants and such that are so “finely tuned” have to be that way because of some natural but not yet identified interactions. A change to one constant would not break the ability of the universe to develop as we know it because some subtle interactions would cause the others to shift appropriately.
Admittedly that’s a difficult premise to investigate.
November 4th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Irishman, that’s a great clarification: that the distinction between the Anthropic Principle and Cosmological ID is that Cosmo ID adds that there’s a supernatural being at work behind it.
November 4th, 2005 at 3:22 pm
Hey all. An acquaintance of mine, a self-proclaimed “fan of science,” says that this type of experiment represents why “science gets a bad name”, because few scientists “know how to properly do science”. When prodded for an explanation, he cited Wright’s comments and said that “No sh–. It was the first thing that popped into my head after reading the first paragraph. Just an amazingly stupidly designed experiment. It would be like guessing how mcuh sand was on a beach and then counting it and saying any left sand must have come out of Donald Trump’s ass.”
He later added:
“did you read the article?? They measured the light they were receiving and then subtracted out an estimate of all the light they KNOW of from KNOWN galaxies and then “reasoned” that whatever was left over had to come from the light from the origin of the universe. Think about it for a few milliseconds and then tell me how stupidly flawed their “logic” is.”
and again:
“Do you realize how flawed it is to assume that any “extra” light you are receiving automatically came from the origin of time. Couldn’t be from any other source? Has to come from the origin of time (like there is such a thing to begin with).”
He’s focusong on the part of the AP report that says the “team then subtracted the radiation levels of all known galaxies and suggested that the leftover measurements include radiation given off by those earliest stars.” Because of how that’s worded, he’s suggesting that they’re doing pure guesswork, because what about potentially unknown galaxies? He’s convinced that Ned Wright is objecting to the analysis for the same reasons. But I disagree; the way I read Wright’s comments, at least, it seemed to me that he was saying that the way we do calculations are too imprecise to draw firm conclusions, not (necessarily) that they forgot to remove some unknown galaxies.
Now, I don’t know the science behind this stuff, but I’m assuming that these scientists didn’t make some really obvious mistake that no other scientists (except Wright, according to him) are picking up on. Can anyone explain? How much do we know about the early universe – is the word “known” used for just scientific precision, or bad journalism, or what? Thanks.
November 4th, 2005 at 6:02 pm
That’s a very good question. Don’t know, myself. But the study does sound a little shaky, at least the way it’s worded. Any thoughts, BA?
November 4th, 2005 at 6:34 pm
Kebsis and Irish,
Fair enough. Certainly this is a “wait and see” situation.
I think it’s understood that we have only scratched the surface of being able to plot the lanes of inter-galactic dust for example. Is there something special about this wavelength of IR that rules out dust as being responsible for the glow?
What kind of tests are available to seperate ancient redshifted starlight as favored over other explanations?
November 6th, 2005 at 11:23 am
David Heddle, thanks for the definitions.
I seem to recall reading somewhere once (curse this fickle memory of mine!) that the idea behind what I now know to be the SAP is that if the constants of nature (electron charge, G, c etc.) had values other than those we measure, the universe would not actually exist at all. So, according to this line of reasoning, the only universe that can exist is one that has the constants “fine-tuned” to give rise to complex life. Which makes a kind of sense to me, although my knowledge of cosmology is rather patchy.
On the validity of the experiment or otherwise, I think the experimenters are making one key assumption: that the objects we can see in the image (i.e. the known stars, galaxies etc.) are the only ones producing light at the right wavelengths to be detected by the instrument. Therefore, any light picked up by the detector that doesn’t come from a known source must come from something that is either no longer there (i.e. the first stars) or is not visible at the wavelengths to which the detector is sensitive. Oh, hang on a sec. If the light detected is produced by something that doesn’t emit light at the right wavelengths to be detected, then this argument is a total non-sequitur (sp?). So it looks like their assumption IS a reasonable one.
I’ve just re-read that last paragraph and now I’m not sure about the logic. I’m a bit too tired right now to try and re-phrase it. Can someone give it a reality-check please? Does it make any sense?
November 7th, 2005 at 7:01 am
That was a pretty good post!
November 7th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Nigel, as I understand it, variations in the constants would cause any universes that formed to quickly evaporate, or collapse, or expand rapidly to infinity, etc. So the problem is not that the universes can’t exist (can’t form), but that they wouldn’t be stable for the length of time of our universe.
November 7th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
Anyone actually read and comprehended the Nature article? I suspect that would clear up some of the ambiguity over how the calculations were made and how the subtractions were performed, and what “known” means. I imagine the CNN article is too much a non-technical press description to draw out the true information.
I think from my understanding that they looked at all the bright objects in the image and subtracted them, then took the remaining background and stretched the contrast. “Known” would mean all objects visible in the image. I don’t think it’s a case of “we deleted everything in the catalog for that region of sky”, though I could be wrong.
It may be fair to surmise that the variations that remain include any leftover light (now in IR) from the earliest stars, but that’s a different claim than that the remaining constrast variations are all due to the earliest stars. I think Ned Wright is more concerned over how they computed the subtractions and determined what to remove, rather than that they might have forgotten about “M-372-Epsilon” or some such.
November 7th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
Different things that description could mean:
1. Take the catalog of all known/identified objects in that region – stars, comets, galaxies, flying monkeys, whatever. Delete all stated intensities for said objects. Look at what’s left.
2. Take the image. Remove all visible bright objects at normal contrast, whatever they are. Their identities may or may not be known (i.e. named, numbered, etc), just that they are visible. Then bump the contrast on the background and see what shows up. Attribute that to old, faded stars.
I think it is 2 rather than 1.
What is left is very faint IR fluctuations from “far” away. Far away means back in time, and redshift pushes the now IR back to visible. Thus the surmise they are early stars. The Press Release also states this:
“This new Spitzer discovery agrees with observations from the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite from the 1990s that suggested there may be an infrared background that could not be attributed to known stars. It also supports observations from the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe from 2003, which estimated that stars first ignited 200 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang.”
“This difficult measurement pushes the instrument to performance limits that were not anticipated in its design,” said team member Dr. S. Harvey Moseley, instrument scientist for Spitzer. “We have worked very hard to rule out other sources for the signal we observed.”
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2005-22/release.shtml
November 8th, 2005 at 4:37 am
[...] The stars were thought to be a hundred times more massive than our sun, extremely hot, bright, and short-lived. They disappeared billions of years ago but their light is still traveling across the universe. The image below shows what might be the glow of the first stars of the universe after all the existing stars, galaxies and other objects were masked out. Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/A. Kashlinsky (GSFC) Read more of this story. Related posts in Raising Boys No related posts by Marlen | posted in Internet, Science Trackback URL | Comment RSS Feed Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links [...]
November 16th, 2005 at 2:42 am
Light from the first stars?
This post explains how researchers at NASA think they may have captured an image of the light from some of the first stars to have formed (13.5 billion years ago); you can even see the picture. Incredible and awe-inspring.
(Original link from Pharyng…
November 16th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Any indication how this diffuse IR glow maps to the known microwave background radiation? Do the distributions of the two line up in any meaningful way?
November 16th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
Thats a good question Scott
I’d also like to see the nature article with more details on how they arrived at there decision, is there a link to it somewhere online?
June 26th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
buy flonase…
buy flonase
buy flonase – buy flonase
Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis.
You would if you could but you can’t so you won’t.
…
June 10th, 2007 at 8:55 am
I am just a average joe and am just curious after reading all of this. If the top image is stars and the bottom is the gases before the biggest first stars, then where are those big stars? why don’t we see them?
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:22 pm
[...] back in November 2005, I wrote about a Spitzer Space Telescope observation that purportedly showed light from the very first objects in the [...]
July 25th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
[...] Scientists may have taken a picture of the first stars ever formed. Check it out and feel very small in a very big universe. Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]