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

Age of the universe?

[sjbe]

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.

Perhaps I've been out of touch with my astronomy studies for too long, I know there are a lot of discoveries being made. However I was under the impression that there was still a great deal of uncertainty about the age of the universe. It was generally agreed that it was somewhere between about 13 billion and 20 billion years old but exactly how old wasn't/isn't clear.

Is there something I don't know about or is this age prediction just an assumption? Have there been some consensus on this recently that I didn't hear about? Anyone know for sure? I'm always suspicious when I see "discoveries" like this whose results depend on something that hasn't been definitely proven.

Why Curisoty Based Research?

[JohnDenver]

"It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them." -Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Moody from the Department Mathematical Sciences, University of Alberta illustrates the importance of curiosity based research in his paper using lasers as an example of why curiosity based research is necessary.

Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon Haunted World, also stresses the importance of curiosity based research using James Clark Maxell's discoveries as an example of how it effects our lives today by providing the necessary building blocks for radio, television, computers, lasers, etc.

Basic science is nice, but erstwhile star captains probably wouldn't find the universe's origins very relevant.

It may not seem very relivant at first, but there are those who would argue in order to even begin to piece together data for a theory of everything (which may be vital to even approach the idea of star captains), we need to gather as much data as possible to reduce our error bars of knowledge.

All in all, Good question... I'm sure some of you have better answers...