New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope strongly suggest that infrared light detected in a prior study originated from clumps of the very first objects of the Universe. The recent data indicate this patchy light is splattered across the entire sky and comes from clusters of bright, monstrous objects more than 13 billion light-years away.
"We are pushing our telescopes to the limit and are tantalizingly close to getting a clear picture of the very first collections of objects," said Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author on two reports to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today."
Astronomers believe the objects are either the first stars -- humongous stars more than 1,000 times the mass of our sun -- or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If the objects are stars, then the observed clusters might be the first mini-galaxies containing a mass of less than about one million suns. The Milky Way galaxy holds the equivalent of approximately 100 billion suns and was probably created when mini-galaxies like these merged.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2006-22/release.shtml
Popular Posts
-
Very dry, dull book with some basic financial info like ROI and cash flow. Not a lot here.
-
Brad Dalton is the first to admit his theory is far-fetched: that bacteria could account for odd light emissions, as well as the reddish hue...
-
Some good stuff from a Canadian futurist: - The rising power of the knowledge worker - Continuous training replaces job security; respect is...
-
I had the pleasure to attend the IBM Think conference in wet and chilly San Fran from Feb 11-14th of this year. The event overall was ...
-
It's been almost exaclty three years since I've updated this blog. In that three years, I've achieved a lot -- I've gone aft...
-
Here's my (edited) journal entry for this event dated 12/01/98: Wow. I just sessioned and started reading "The Tao of Physics...
-
Nother confirmation Of einstein... the first images of light escaping a black hole show that they lose energy. In this case, it was a superm...
-
Not a bad audio book, but I expected more. Big ideas: Build a high performance, high-trust culture; Identify desired results and un...
-
Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Dont j...
-
The probes findings have provided a few salient new notions about the nature of cosmic reality. For starters, the universe is 13.7 billion y...
