SETI public: FW: GSFC Release: SCIENTISTS SEE LIGHT THAT MAY BE FROM FIRST OBJECTS IN UNIVERSE

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>From: Ed Campion <Edward.S.Campion_at_nasa.gov>
>Reply-To: Ed Campion <Edward.S.Campion_at_nasa.gov>
>To: gsfc_press_releases_at_listserv.gsfc.nasa.gov
>Subject: GSFC Release: SCIENTISTS SEE LIGHT THAT MAY BE FROM FIRST
>OBJECTS IN UNIVERSE
>Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:37:59 -0500
>
>
>
>
>Dewayne Washington
>November 2, 2005
>Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Md. 1 p.m. EST
>(Phone: 301-286-0040)
>
>Release 05-47
>
>SCIENTISTS SEE LIGHT THAT MAY BE FROM FIRST OBJECTS IN UNIVERSE
>
>Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected
>light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed,
>the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago
>when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to
>millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive.
>
>This light could be from the very first stars or perhaps from hot gas
>falling into the first black holes. The science team, based at NASA Goddard
>Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., describes the observation as seeing
>the glow of a distant city at night from an airplane. The light is too
>distant and feeble to resolve individual objects.
>
>"We think we are seeing the collective light from millions of the first
>objects to form in the universe," said Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky, Science
>Systems and Applications scientist and lead author on the Nature article
>that appears in the Nov. 3 issue. "The objects disappeared eons ago, yet
>their light is still traveling across the universe."
>
>Scientists theorize that space, time and matter originated 13.7 billion
>years ago in a Big Bang. Another 200 million years would pass before the
>era of first starlight. A 10-hour observation by Spitzer's infrared array
>camera in the constellation Draco captured a diffuse glow of infrared
>light, lower in energy than optical light and invisible to us. The Goddard
>team says that this glow is likely from Population III stars, a
>hypothesized class of stars thought to have formed before all others.
>(Population I and II stars, named by order of their discovery, comprise the
>familiar types of stars we see at night.)
>
>Theorists say the first stars were likely over a hundred times more massive
>than Earth's sun and extremely hot, bright, and short-lived, each one
>burning for only a few million years. The ultraviolet light that Population
>III stars emitted would be redshifted, or stretched to lower energies, by
>the universe's expansion. That light should now be detectable in the
>infrared.
>
>"This deep observation was filled with familiar-looking stars and
>galaxies," said Dr. John Mather, senior project scientist for James Webb
>Space Telescope and a co-author on the Nature article. "We removed
>everything we knew---all the stars and galaxies both near and far. We were
>left with a picture of part of the sky with no stars or galaxies, but it
>still had this infrared glow with giant blobs that we think could be the
>glow from the very first stars."
>
>This new Spitzer discovery agrees with observations from the NASA Cosmic
>Background Explorer 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."
>
>The low noise and high resolution of Spitzer's infrared array camera
>enabled the team to remove the fog of foreground galaxies, made of later
>stellar populations, until the cumulative light from the first light
>dominated the signal on large angular scales. The team, which also includes
>Dr. Richard Arendt, Science Systems and Applications scientist, noted that
>future missions, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, will find the
>first individual clumps of these stars or the individual exploding stars
>that might have made the first black holes.
>
>This analysis was partially funded through the National Science Foundation.
>The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer
>mission for NASA. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science
>Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. NASA Goddard
>built Spitzer's infrared array camera which took the observations. The
>instrument's principal investigator is Dr. Giovanni Fazio, Smithsonian
>Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Mass. Scientists Kashlinsky and
>Arendt are supported at NASA Goddard through funding from Science Systems
>and Applications, Inc.
>
>Additional contact: M. Mitchell Waldrop, National Science Foundation,
>Arlington, Va.
>(Phone: 703-292-7752).
>
>For graphics and more information about Spitzer:
>
>http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media
>
>For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit:
>
>http://www.nasa.gov/home/
>
>-end-
>

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