Posted on 01/09/2002 5:24:37 AM PST by Darth Reagan
WASHINGTON (AP) - A half billion years of utter blackness following the Big Bang, the theoretical start of the universe, was broken by an explosion of stars bursting into life like a fireworks finale across the heavens, a new theory suggests.
An analysis of very faint galaxies in the deepest view of the universe ever captured by a telescope suggests there was an eruption of stars bursting to life and piercing the blackness very early in the 15-billion year history of the universe.
The study, by Kenneth M. Lanzetta of the State University of New York at Stony Brook challenges the long held belief that star formation started slowly after the Big Bang and didn't peak until some five billion years later.
``Star formation took place early and very rapidly,'' Lanzetta said Tuesday at a NASA (news - web sites) news conference. ``Star formation was ten times higher in the distant early universe than it is today.''
Lanzetta's conclusions are based on an analysis of what is called a deep field study by the Hubble Space Telescope (news - web sites). To capture the faintest and most distant images possible, the Hubble focused on an ordinary bit of sky for more than 14 days, taking a picture of every object within a small, deep slice of the heavens. The resulting images are faint, fuzzy bits of light from galaxies near and far, including some more than 14 billion light years away, said Lanzetta.
The surprise was that the farther back the telescope looked, the greater was the star forming activity.
``Star formation continued to increase to the very earliest point that we could see,'' said Lanzetta. ``We are seeing close to the first burst of star formation.''
Bruce Margon of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore said Lanzetta's conclusions are a ``surprising result'' that will need to be confirmed by other studies.
``This suggests that the great burst of star formation was at the beginning of the universe,'' said Margon, noting that, in effect: ``The finale came first.''
``If this can be verified, it will dramatically change our understanding of the universe,'' said Anne Kinney, director of the astronomy and physics division at NASA.
In his study, Lanzetta examined light captured in the Hubble deep field images using up to 12 different light filters to separate the colors. The intensity of red was used to establish the distance to each point of light. The distances were then used to create a three-dimensional perspective of the 5,000 galaxies in the Hubble picture.
Lanzetta also used images of nearby star fields as a yardstick for stellar density and intensity to conclude that about 90 percent of the light in the very early universe was not detected by the Hubble. When this missing light was factored into the three dimensional perspective, it showed that the peak of star formation came just 500 million years after the Big Bang and has been declining since.
Current star formation, he said, ``is just a trickle'' of that early burst of stellar birth.
Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, a California Institute of Technology astronomer, said that the colors of the galaxies in the Hubble deep field images ``are a very good indication of their distance.''
Current theory suggests that about 15 billion years ago, an infinitely dense single point exploded - the Big Bang - creating space, time, matter and extreme heat. As the universe cooled, light elements, such as hydrogen and helium, formed. Later, some of areas became more dense with elements than others, forming gravitational centers that attracted more and more matter. Eventually, formed celestial bodies became dense enough to start nuclear fires, setting the heavens aglow. These were newborn stars.
Storrie-Lombardi said that current instruments and space telescopes now being planned could eventually, perhaps, see into the Dark Era, the time before there were stars.
``We are getting close to the epoch were we can not see at all,'' she said.
Me too! Let's hope we find that "missing mass" soon.
Speaking for yourself, of course. The expansion isn't very hard to describe. What's important is that expansions (and curvatures) of a manifold can be detected locally. (Result due to Gauss) The surface of a sphere has no center (or corners). If the sphere is expanding, points will move away from each other.
Yes, It Does!
Let's assume a totally uniform distribution of energy. With a high enough energy density, particles will be pulled out of the vacuum. This is an intrinsically random process; the particles will not appear simultaneously on the points of a lattice*, but will have a random distribution. Random distributions by nature have areas of differing density. As in the distribution of cancer cases in the U.S., the dense lumps don't require a cause. Any resulting lumps will be amplified by the effect of gravitational collapse.
Furthermore, those stars that are 14 billion years away, are traveling at near the speed of light, so therefore, they are not 14 billion years away, they are 29 billion years away, making a current diameter of 58 billion light years.
The stars that we see that are 14 billion years away, were 14 billion years away, 14 billion years ago. They are now 29 billion years away.
Lastly, what we see that existed 14 billion years ago, is long gone, they no longer exist. No star lasts 29 billion years, or for that matter, no star lasts even 14 billion years. Everything we see out there, has long since burned out.
Check out the National Geographic Map of the Universe. First published around june of 1983 or so, it is an excellent 3 dimensional map of the total universe. It is so good, even a preschooler(mine did) can understand and visualize the entire universe, and where we are in it, and where all the known galaxies are, and so forth.
You both might want to read the following Inflation for Beginners. It addresses the complexity/uniformity problem.
excerpt: The theory said that inflation should have left behind an expanded version of these fluctuations, in the form of irregularities in the distribution of matter and energy in the Universe. These density perturbations would have left an imprint on the background radiation at the time matter and radiation decoupled (about 300,000 years after the Big Bang), producing exactly the kind of nonuniformity in the background radiation that has now been seen, initially by COBE and later by other instruments. After decoupling, the density fluctuations grew to become the large scale structure of the Universe revealed today by the distribution of galaxies. This means that the COBE observations are actually giving us information about what was happening in the Universe when it was less than 10-20 of a second old.
No other theory can explain both why the Universe is so uniform overall, and yet contains exactly the kind of "ripples" represented by the distribution of galaxies through space and by the variations in the background radiation.
I was hoping someone would say this; what you propose then, is a topographical universe with no core or center whatsoever, right?
Is it then hollow?
By this definition there is no uniformity; it must all be an illusion.
The gauge theories of particle physics suggest that there is a "natural" scale of order the Planck length. It is entirely possible that the objects we take to be pointlike are actually extended somehow over a scale equal to the Planck scale. (Many "theories of everything" such as superstring theories exploit this.) Back when the radius of the universe was of this order, I could imagine a state of true and perfect uniformity.
Which version? It has been updated at least once, with different galaxies and clusters and Quasars on the updated one. Write to Nat'l Geographic and get a new updated copy with different items added. A great map!
No.
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