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.
This is what bothers me. If they are equivalent, then how can we say the expansion of the universe is due to space expanding and not movement within space, unless we can distinguish between the two?
I can't tell what if anything is wrong with the logic that leads him to infer what he does from the "strange xenon" type evidence. But nowhere does the article address the broader evidence picture, which I think strongly weighs against his idea. I seem to recall our sun is thought to be a garden-variety main-sequence star. I'm left to wonder how Dr. Manuel explains that.
The big question that I don't see answered is one of time frames. There are about 10 or so supernova remnants within a kiloparsec. Why don't we see star formation around them? Most supernova remnants show large voids about the central radio source (where there is one). How long does it take for this to occur? Unfortunately, the article is not very clear about it. His web page is not much help either. Sadly, it reads like some of the letters that we occasionally receive from various people with some very strange ideas, and very poor grammar.
We've known the mass of the earth since before 1800, when Cavendish measured the strength of the gravitational force. From the mass of the earth, its orbit around the sun, and Newton's Law of Gravitation, we know the mass of the sun. If you somehow make the sun more massive, then it takes more velocity for the earth to maintain a stable orbit at its current distance.
Which only brings me back to the point that I'd expect someone to have noticed by now if the sun had more iron and more density than we think. Are we going too fast for the current model of the sun's composition but nobody's noticed?
Depends on the distances you want to talk about. Luckily, the expansion of the universe is nearly immeasurable at close distances, so you can throw it out for most measurements, like measuring velocities within the galaxy. But once you get outside what is assumed to be the galactic halo (about 300 kilopasecs, or about 1200000 light years), then you have to factor it out. Luckily, the expansion of the universe has been occurring nearly linearly in recent times, so you can just measure the velocity, and since the Hubble velocity of expansion is generally larger than the velocity of motion through space, you can fit that distance with other distance estimates, like Cepheids, Type I supernovae, and other methods. Whatever is left over is a good estimate of the space velocity of the source along the line of sight.
There are other caveats, but that should give you a good idea of how it is done.
Why, nowhere but in the mind of the Person who Created the doughnut in the first place...
"Donuts. Is there anything they can't do?" -- Homer Simpson
When that happens, I want pictures!
Shalom.
Since human beings can mis-use either (which might make your point - hmmm) I prefer to say, "All Truth is G-d's Truth."
Shalom.
The Rabbis used to teach it was the light of Messiah. I believe it is what we call "Shekinah." In any event, the very next thing G-d did was separate the light from the darkness. IMO: the separated dark place is hell.
Shalom.
I think that was Cheech and Chong.
I agree. I always think of evil as being the absence of God's light.
Shalom.
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