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

Just curious.

[perdida]

Is there any application for this kind of astronomy?

If I were a director of federal astronomy I would enthusiastically fund near-galactic research that searched for wormholes, civilizations, planets that could support life, etc -- any kind of knowledge we need for a feasible star economy.

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

Re:I'm amazed

[vandan]

I read that book, and yes it is a much more consistent theory than the big bang theory. I am constantly amazed by the rate at which new types of matter are invented to hold together the fraying edges of the big bang theory. As I can see other people have also read this book, and ... well ... it seems that most people simpily can't handle scientific truth when it goes against pre-conceived ideas. Their loss...