Fergie's Tech Blog

Earliest starlight of the universe is revealed

Galaxies and stars in the constellation Draco (top)
were removed (bottom) to reveal glowing splotches (yellow)
that might come from the very first generation of stars.
Image source: New Scientist / NASA / JPL-Caltech / GSFC

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope may have detected the infrared glow from the very first generation of stars, a new study reports. If confirmed, the work would reveal the structure of the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang, when the galaxies that exist today were just beginning to take shape.

Astronomers have already detected light from even earlier times, when the universe was a mere 370,000 years old. It was then that radiation first escaped from a scalding primordial soup of matter and energy, and it still suffuses space today in the form of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

But infrared light also floods space in what is called the cosmic infrared background radiation. "It is a repository of the emissions of all the stars that have ever existed in the universe," says the study’s lead author, Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

posted by Fergie @ 11/02/2005 10:38:00 AM