The 1st Generation of Stars

Andy_Howell writes "Astronomers may have found members of the first generation of stars in the universe. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck I telescope, they observed a faint red blob that had been magnified into a double image by a gravitational lens. The blob was found to be a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old. The clump appears to contain only about a million stars, and is less than a few million years old. It is thought that swarms of these clumps came together over the age of the universe to create the galaxies we see today."

Comments

Alternative Cosmology...

[Boulder Geek]

And why you should be very, very skeptical...

The problem with "The Big Bang Never Happened" (which I have read) and other alternative cosmologies is that they don't even attempt to go deep enough to prove their points. There's a reason for this. All of modern cosmology is based on General Relativity. If you are going to say that the Big Bang Never Happened, then your alternative cosmology has to not only come up with an alternative explanation for the Universe, but also explain everything that GR does without having a Big Bang. This is a very tall order.

It isn't enough to point out the contradictions in the standard model. It is also necessary to build a new model that explains all observations. To date, no one has been able to do this without having a Big Bang at the start.