Hi My Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., he faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe
may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA's
Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive
stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen
individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what
appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.
These two panels show the same slice of
sky in the constellation Boötes, dubbed the "Extended Groth Strip." The
area covered is about 1 by 0.12 degrees. Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC › Full image and caption
Hidden Patterns of Light Revealed by Spitzer
Astronomers have uncovered patterns of light that appear to be from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe. The light patterns were hidden within a strip of sky observed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.These two panels show the same slice of sky in the constellation Boötes, dubbed the "Extended Groth Strip." The area covered is about 1 by 0.12 degrees.
The top panel show's Spitzer's initial infrared view of this patch, including foreground stars and a confusion of fainter galaxies, seen at a wavelength of 4.5 microns.
In the lower panel, all of the resolved stars and galaxies have been masked out of the image (grey patches), and the remaining background glow has been smoothed and enhanced. This processing reveals structure too faint to be seen in the original image.
The structure of the lower panel matches just what we would expect for the patterns of clusters from the first galaxies formed in the universe. Even though any particular early galaxy would be too faint to see individually, this technique allows astronomers to better understand what things were like shortly after the Big Bang.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC
PASADENA, Calif. -- The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first
objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision
yet, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be
wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to
be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence
of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.
The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel.
"These objects would have been tremendously bright," said Alexander
"Sasha" Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Md., lead author of a new paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.
"We can't yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that
could be coming from our nearby universe, but it is now becoming
increasingly likely that we are catching a glimpse of an ancient epoch.
Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for NASA's upcoming James Webb
Telescope, which will tell us exactly what and where these first objects
were."
Spitzer first caught hints of this remote pattern of light, known as the
cosmic infrared background, in 2005, and again with more precision in
2007. Now, Spitzer is in the extended phase of its mission, during which
it performs more in-depth studies on specific patches of the sky.
Kashlinsky and his colleagues used Spitzer to look at two patches of sky
for more than 400 hours each.
The team then carefully subtracted all the known stars and galaxies in
the images. Rather than being left with a black, empty patch of sky,
they found faint patterns of light with several telltale characteristics
of the cosmic infrared background. The lumps in the pattern observed
are consistent with the way the very distant objects are thought to be
clustered together.
Kashlinsky likens the observations to looking for Fourth of July
fireworks in New York City from Los Angeles. First, you would have to
remove all the foreground lights between the two cities, as well as the
blazing lights of New York City itself. You ultimately would be left
with a fuzzy map of how the fireworks are distributed, but they would
still be too distant to make out individually.
"We can gather clues from the light of the universe's first fireworks,"
said Kashlinsky. "This is teaching us that the sources, or the "sparks,"
are intensely burning their nuclear fuel."
The universe formed roughly 13.7 billion years ago in a fiery, explosive
Big Bang. With time, it cooled and, by around 500 million years later,
the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take shape.
Astronomers say some of that "first light" might have traveled billions
of years to reach the Spitzer Space Telescope. The light would have
originated at visible or even ultraviolet wavelengths and then, because
of the expansion of the universe, stretched out to the longer, infrared
wavelengths observed by Spitzer.
The new study improves on previous observations by measuring this cosmic
infrared background out to scales equivalent to two full moons --
significantly larger than what was detected before. Imagine trying to
find a pattern in the noise in an old-fashioned television set by
looking at just a small piece of the screen. It would be hard to know
for certain if a suspected pattern was real. By observing a larger
section of the screen, you would be able to resolve both small- and
large-scale patterns, further confirming your initial suspicion.
Likewise, astronomers using Spitzer have increased the amount of sky
examined to obtain more definitive evidence of the cosmic infrared
background. The researchers plan to explore more patches of sky in the
future to gather more clues hidden in the light of this ancient era.
"This is one of the reasons we are building the James Webb Space
Telescope," said Glenn Wahlgren, Spitzer program scientist at NASA
Headquarters in Washington. "Spitzer is giving us tantalizing clues, but
James Webb will tell us what really lies at the era where stars first
ignited."
Other authors are Richard Arendt of Goddard and the University of
Maryland in Baltimore County; Matt Ashby and Giovanni Fazio of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.; and
John Mather and Harvey Moseley of Goddard. Fazio led the initial
observations of these sky fields.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer
Space Telescope mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science
Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are
archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared
Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about Spitzer, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer
NASA
Guillermo Gonzao Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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