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NASA Sees Glow of Universe's First Objects
Damek writes with news from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which has captured light from what may have been the first glowing objects in the universe, light generated 14 billion years ago. From the article: "'We are pushing our telescopes to the limit and are tantalizingly close to getting a clear picture of the very first collections of objects,' said Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky... 'Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today.' Astronomers believe the objects are either the first stars — humongous stars more than 1,000 times the mass of our sun — or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If the objects are stars, then the observed clusters might be the first mini-galaxies..."
Once the have a telescope that can peer past that glow, they find the number "42" at one of the cosmos and a hitchhiker thumb at the other end.
If it took 14 billion years for the light to reach us, and the universe is 14 billion years old, does that mean that we are on the very edge of the expanding universe? Does that mean that we should be able to "see" the outside edge of it?
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Focusing on glowing objects...
"Ahhhh, I can see what it says!"
"What is it?"
"Its a sign of some kind!"
"A sign?, what does it say?"
"Look out behind you!"
liqbase
Since when is a star of 1000 times the mass of the Sun a humungous star? The Sun is a pretty small star compared to others...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
... 'cause 14 billion years is about as old as news can get. Literally.
Thank you, I'll be here all week, enjoy the sushi!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
by some more powerful equipment. From New Scientist Space: "Because Hubble's mirror is larger than Spitzer's, it turned up dwarf galaxies too faint for Spitzer to resolve. "Once we remove pixels in the Spitzer images corresponding to the locations of these galaxies, the background infrared light level mostly disappears," Cooray told New Scientist. 'We think, therefore, the infrared light seen in Spitzer images is mostly due to the faint infrared glow from these dwarf galaxies.'" The full article
Would subtracting bright objects really leave a clear sky? FTA:
The analysis first involved carefully removing the light from all foreground stars and galaxies in the five regions of the sky, leaving only the most ancient light. The scientists then studied fluctuations in the intensity of infrared brightness, in the relatively diffuse light.
The press release doesn't go into much detail; but wouldn't interstellar hydrogen refract some small amount of light from nearby sources toward the earth, causing a general pattern of relatively diffuse light in between the foreground stars and galaxies?
Unless you're some crappy open miccer at Japone in DC. . . then I could see it.
Failing to find a correlation between sushi and comedy clubs, I could have put together you're not a comic because the joke sucked. Too obvious.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
It is true that there are stars that are far more massive and brighter than the our sun.
However, while not "special" in any way, Sol is much larger than average, because the vast majority of stars are really small, dim red dwarfs.
I don't understand how even if we are on opposite sides of this expanding balloon (or whatever other expansion analogy you want to pick) how this can exceed the speed of light. I can't see another way for light from the birth of our universe to reach us only now.
*thinks about it more*
Nope, doesn't make sense to me.
How do NASA or anyone know that the light is from 14 billion years? Why not 13.5 or 13 or even 15.7 billion yrs?
What's the error margin in their calculations?
Would be interesting to know.
Sour grapes probably doesn't apply, however, since I've walked the comedy road and found it wanting. That said, I'll be onstage tonight to support a friend's open mic with my tired old material and try to suppress the bile that fills my throat when I hear yet another poorly executed hack-ass premise from a newbie.
But hey, maybe it does apply, as I'm a bitter mofo who's not making millions of dollars telling jokes.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Obviously. If you go back far enough in time, of course you'll see the glow from when the dimmer switch is just being turned up. I can't believe we waste perfectly good Science Money on wacky alternative theories, when the EUDS explains this perfectly.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Cool!
and we're stuck in this big black tunnel...
How large was the universe at the big bang? We know that according to Einstein that matter is not supposed travel faster than the speed of light however if that is true then it would mean that the universe was probably greater than 14 billion light years across if we are able to see light that is about 14 billion years old and we suspect that the universe is 14.7 Billion years old currently.
The journal articles that go along with the story:
New Measurements of Cosmic Infrared Background Fluctuations from Early Epochs
On the Nature of the Sources of the Cosmic Infrared Background
(These were posted in the article, but only under a tiny "More info" link at the bottom that is easy to overlook.)
Soon, you'll be able to just fucking google for it :
Keywords : God's last message to creation
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Is this truely the light from the very first objects in the universe reaching us, or is this observable stuff just reaching us that took place long after the first things appeared, obliterated, and cycled a few times after? How do we know the observable stuff from the true first objects hasn't already reached Earth and passed us by long before we had the ability to detect it?
You can read the technical papers on which this press release is based:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0612445
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0612447
The basic idea is that the astronomers used an infrared
space telescope to take very deep images. They then tried
to remove all the obvious sources of light, and examined
the resulting "blank" images very carefully. They claim that
there are very faint sources of infrared radiation which
remain, and that the spatial correlation of these sources
is roughly what one would expect if they were young galaxies
in the very early universe.
There are limited opportunities for other astronomers
to examine the same regions with other telescopes and
at other wavelengths; that could provide evidence that
might support the claim, or weaken it (if, for example,
radio telescopes detect some of these sources and
show that they are ordinary galaxies in the relatively
nearby universe, that would weaken the claim in
the press release).
We can also just wait a decade or so for JWST, a more
powerful infrared space telescope, to observe the same
field.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Matter must travel slower than the speed of light, this is true. But space itself can expand.
The article says the light is 13 billion years old and the estimated age of the uinverse is 13.7 billion years. 14 billion years is not correct.
Not sure I understand what you're asking, but going backwards, I believe scientists would only end up at something like a singularity of the known forces in universe at infinite energy using the common big bang theory. In other words, I don't think we really have much of a clue. :-) Also, below the planck time (~ 5*10^-44 seconds) after the big bang, our modern theories of physics basically fall apart. The planck time is in turn the time it takes for a photon to travel the planck length, the shortest possible length our common modern theories can speak of.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...wavelengths have been stretched to infrared wavelengths by the growing space-time that results in the Universe's expansion. It is the expansion of space itself, rather than the proper motion of celestial objects away from each other, that is important. If you change the distance metric used in formulae rather than the distance values, your resulting speed values are not limited by special relativity.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion
If one point in space is expanding fast enough ("edge" of space) in relationship to another point (us), and then if the first object was accellerated to close to light speed velocities, away from the second point, wouldn't it appear as if the first object was moving away from the second object faster than the speed of light?
Okay, another way of putting it: if there's a governed "speed limit" on your ant balloon, of 10" per minute, and the ant is travelling out from the center at that speed, while at the same time I'm blowing up the balloon, wouldn't the ant appear to be moving away from all points behind it, faster than 10" per minute?
The thing is, we know the speed of light within space is constant, and under normal circumstances (all that we know, anyway) can't be breached. But that isn't accounting for the displacement due to "expanding space". Is it, then, possible to observe two extremely distant objects as moving away from each other faster than the speed of light?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Let's say I can see the light from 2 stars. You tell me that one star is 1000 light years away and the other is 5000 light years away. Given that both are visible from my observation point, how were you able to tell me the distance (in light years) that the light traveled to get here?
I know the speed of light is a constant. I just don't know how you can observe one light source and know how long it took the light to get here unless you already know the distance by some other means.
If this is true, then in the first 10e-33 seconds (or less) the whole matter of the universe expanded from a point size to something approximating its current density (or close enough for the purposes of a laboratory approximation) There's a lot of acceleration involved there!
I'm pretty skeptical of the big bang theory. I find the idea that the universe started as a point quite difficult to rationalise. It would be nicer (i.e. more satisfying) if it were not expanding and there was another explanation for red shift - but I think big bang has been so widely accepted that most scientists are not thinking outside that particular box. Everything that gets observed in the universe these days gets shoe-horned into the big bloody bang. Come on guys... its rubbish, it's on par with god-based explanations. I think we can do better.
Just my opinion.
I find two immediate errors in this article:
1) Considering that the speed of light is thought to be decreasing, 14 billion light-years isn't light from 14 billion years ago. It's far more recent than that.
2) If the big bang theory is to be believed, our matter (that we lovingly call the earth) was at the big bang. It was a part of one of the early objects that the article refers to. That means that we can't be seeing the early components of the universe. If we were, we'd see our own matter too. That would imply that our matter had exceeded the speed of light to arrive here.
Way to make claims that violate the theory of relativity, NASA.
The current belief is that more than one of the theories is likely to be wrong, although it is entirely possible that they are all correct depending on the observer and/or universe. (In the Many Worlds theory, there is one instance of the Universe for every possible permutation of valid events that could ever occur. If this theory is correct and the shape of the Universe is dictated by events, then the shape of the Universe is determined by which branch you happen to be on at the time you do the observation. If branches can interact, this may vary between observations.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You now tak the award as the most ignorant post ever on slashdot.
Congratulation.
Blaming NASA was a nice touch.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think of the universe as the area in which the laws of physics apply. More of an intangible(universe), interacting with another intangible(space). Even the word "beyond" loses meaning past the edge of the universe.
We are all just people.
I'm not gonna comment on this post. But I'd like to know who's moderating this "interesting"??
I supposed I should meta-moderate again these days...
Who gives a shit. In ten years scientists will tack on 2 more billion years to the age of the universe then announce "FIRST UNIVERSE OBJECTS OBSERVED!!! HONEST!!!"
I've never understood this. If light from the beginning of the universe started traveling at the speed of light 14 billion years ago, how can we be out ahead of it to see it? At what point did the particles that became us move out from the beginning of the universe faster than light, so we can now turn back to the direction from which we came and see what should be very far ahead of us. No this is not a troll. It's a real question. Thanks in advance.
San Francisco Photographers
Do not stare into universe with remaining eye.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
If the earth is 4.5 billion years old, wouldn't that make the light captured by the telescope no older than 4.5 billion years old ?
Wouldn't we have to be looking in the other direction to see light that was emitted 14 billion years ago, AND be traveling at the speed of light to see it ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
What right do those scientists with all their so-called empirical evidence have to refute my dogmatic assertions? The Bible says the Earth is 6000 years old and what is NASA and their 'telescopes' but Satan's another attempt encompass and tempt the true believers like myself.
How come all the verbs in those quotes about early objects aren't in past tense?
--
make install -not war
Because, your ignorance brought about by your education has ignored the Time Cube's rotation.
No human or god can match Nature's simultaneous 4 day rotation in 1 Earth rotation.
No human has a right to believe wrong - for that would be evil thinking.
How can we receive light generated 14 billion years ago if we came from the same origin? The big bang! Probably our solar system travelled ahead of the light speed for a long time, and after that, tired, we begin to travel slowly, and the light reached us!
I have no idea if this has been asked already, or if this even makes sense according to relativity, but it would help to get some feedback. According to the Big Bang theory, everything in the Universe is moving out from one central point (this isn't exact, but I know it's something along these lines). I don't understand how we may receive images from this starting point, 14 billion years in the past. With how long a distance light has to travel, it makes total sense, but hasn't the light been traveling with us or faster than us this entire time?
What I don't understand is if the matter that makes up the our solar system originated at the center of the universe how could we possibly see the birth of the universe? That would imply that the matter was at least initially exploded way faster than the speed of light. Is that what astrophysicists believe happened from the big bang? What am I missing?
Unidentified Glowing Object?!
Ok, correction noted. There isn't even agreement that a shape exists at all! Aaaargh! (Why, given my post, am I amazingly unsurprised?) I'd still love to see the references, so if you could post them (or e-mail them to me) that would be great. Nonetheless, I do still feel we should round up all the quantum cosmologists and give them electro-shock therapy until they're prepared to do better than one theory of the structure of the Universe per unit of data per observation per experiment - or, at least, agree not to devise experiments that will "prove" everyone asking for a grant check that year correct.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wow, we can now see all the way back into our universe's 6 thousand year history!
(That was a joke, for the humor-challenged amongst you)
I wonder why they don't do something useful with those telescopes and just once and for all point them towards the moon, and show us what is at Tranquility Base.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Everyone knows the universe is only 6,000 years old.
Ah shit, the salesman said the trilobite fossil was 7,000. I want my money back.
Table-ized A.I.
Um, I'm pretty sure that the question of how old the 'universe' is has already been answered. 6,000 years. Don't believe me? Read the Bible. Because it's never wrong. You know how I know? My preacher told me so.
Yea, I know. Flamebait. But I couldn't resist.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Nasa even admitted to it.
Before the first manned moon mission, I heard scientists on the radio and TV say that "if no evidence of life is found on the moon, science will have to go completely back to the drawing board in our study of the origin of the universe". But, the Lunar probes found no evidence of life on the moon, it was sterile. But, has science "gone back to the drawing board"? I don't think so.
A discovery on the first moon mission PROVED, instead of disproved, God's Word. Dr. Henry Morris, a scientist who is a Bible believing Christian, said that scientists expected the moon to have about 22 feet of "moon dust" on its surface. Objects in space are said to attract cosmic "dust" at a rate determined by the density of their atmosphere and the "age" of the object. NASA scientists used a formula to determine the thickness of the moons dust, and they used so many "millions of years" for the age of the moon. If you remember, the Lunar Lander had huge flat feet, so it wouldn't sink into the "moon dust", and guess what, the feet went "clunk", in just a few inches of moon dust.
Dr. Morris then used NASA's own formula and worked it BACKWARDS with the moon's correct "inches of dust", and solved for the moon's "AGE". The astonishing answer, using NASA's own formula, was that the moon calculates to be about 7000 years old!
If the moon is only 7000 years old, then the universe is only 7000 years old as well.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A fundamental problem with the assertion that radio astronomers are now seeing the "afterglow" from the "Big Bang", is that we would have had to *beat* the light here. We should be, SHOULD BE, INSIDE the light-cone of the "Big Bang" event. according to the theory, and let me underscore that word, THEORY. No matter how powerful the telescope, there is no way we should be able to see the 'bang', or anything which occured shortly thereafter. In fact, if the universe is *only* 13+ billion years old, the electromagnetic energy from the 'bang' raced past us at 300,000 km/s about 13+ BILLION YEARS AGO, while the matter that would one day become us, plodded by at a comparitively pokey... well, less than 300,000 km/s. So someone please explain to me... how did our planet got in front of it?
At the risk of flamebateing, I want to point this out: a true scientist cleaves NOT to any hypothesis that does not jibe with the observations.
I'm not asserting I know what happened, I am just asserting that the "Big Bang" could not have, and all the "evidence" of it is a case of "scientists" trying to fit the data to the hypothesis, and as far as I'm concerned, it's just as much a 'belief system' as any other.
~Hallux
'intrinsically incredibly bright'
:-)
:-)
Sounds like they dug up one of my old report cards from school. Now look where I've ended up!
I just hope those Galaxies or blackholes [or whatever they are] have a better career than me!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
I still don't get this.
.. 14 billion years ?
The object is supposed to be 14 billion lightyears away. About the time
it is theorized our universe came to existence by the means of bing bang.
What, our solar system traveled faster than light to get 14 billion lightyears
away from this one, in
Or was the big bang really BIG , banging matter into existence all over todays known
universe(seems to contradict a bit with the ever expanding universe, unless it expands
faster than the speed of light, relatively speaking) ?
I never understood that. Black holes' gravity is so strong that it even captures bypassing photons, hence the name 'black hole'. How can it emit energy, since energy is photons? why are these photons allowed to escape?
Ah shit, the salesman said the trilobite fossil was 7,000. I want my money back.
That's because Creationists and Evolutionary Biologists measure trilobytes differently. It's a marketing thing, don't worry about it.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
We can't observe the hole itself but we can observe the effect it has on matter that hasn't fallen into it's event horizon. Matter will not fall straight into a hole; it will spiral in. As it is spiraling in, it will emit X-rays as a sort of death cry. Also black holes have magnetic fields and spin. A black hole actively feeding will ionize matter and some of this charged matter can be caught in the holes magnetic field and ejected from its poles as bright jets. It is a misconception to think of a black hole as a sort of cosmic vacuum cleaner that will suck down everything. A black hole has no more gravity than the mass that gave birth to it. A black hole can be safely orbited for instance. But the mass of a hole is so intensely concentrated that very exotic tidal effects are caused closer in to the hole. Get too close and yes even light will not escape. Get almost too close and very very weird (but predictable and observable) things happen.
Since there can never truly be such a thing as a true vacuum black holes can even evaporate. Since absolute zero can only be approached (but never reached) any given volume of space has a quantity of energy available within it. This energy can give rise to pairs of particles once thresholds are reached. The particles are formed in pairs because properties like spin and charge are conserved. This matter does not come from nothing! It is formed at the expense of available energy in the vicinity. If a pair of particles forms in the vicinity of a black hole's event horizon then one of the pair can fall into the hole while the other sluggishly makes it's way away from the hole. This happens at the expense of the energy of the hole itself so if the black hole isn't being fed with other sources then it will shrink a trifle. Large black holes have event horizons that appear barely curved at subatomic scales; this means that large black holes lose mass very slowly in this way. Even a hole with a few times the sun's mass will last far longer than the universe has existed to date. Smaller holes have more curvature on local scales and lose energy very very quickly. This is why the prospect of forming a hole in a particle accelerator isn't particularly scary.
This cartoon shows how the universe really began. http://www.unripe.com/pages/cartoon%2074%20profess or%20punripes%20telescope.html
We are not in front, behind or anywhere...we simply are part of a wiggling, vibrating universe that has been fooling our simple brains. What did the electromagnetic energy of the big bang pass through?
I think we are wrong about the big bang....and about time. We operating on an assumption that "time" is real. If you take time out of astronomy then the big bang falls apart. "We" perceive the constant vibration of the universe has the passage of time because that is how our brains cope with our existence. There is a growing movement of people who are starting to look at time, how we measure it how we assume that it is a constant. For the most part time is defined in the boundaries of our ability see, hear, feel...we see time from the result of movement or change, the decay of atoms the result of potential energy on a spring, a flow of elections, the spinning of earth. Is that time?
We cannot break free of this except when we are unconscious or "zoned out". Nothing will come of our research into the origins of the universe until we ourselves transcend conventional thinking. It won't be science alone that allows us to discover and understand the universe. It will be mostly evolution. At some moment there will be an explosion of awareness and the universe as we have come to to believe will not be the same as our brains will evolve to a point where we will easily see beyond the "facade" of the universe. We will be aware of how we are not "in" the universe but part of it in a very profound way and we will see that the universe is not complicated, mysterious or grand. When we do that we will be able to do things unimaginable in our current plane of existence.
Proof? None needed. Faith? Not required. Being?....that is a good start.
That has nothing to do with the actual theory of the Big Bang.
Big Bang cosmology holds that instead of matter exploding into empty space, space was once uniformly filled everywhere with matter, and that space subsequently expanded. No matter how far back towards the Big Bang you go, there is always some set of points in space from which their light is reaching us just now; the light from closer points has already reached us, and the light from farther points has not yet had time to reach us. At the risk of flamebateing, I want to point this out: a true scientist cleaves NOT to any hypothesis that does not jibe with the observations.
I'm not asserting I know what happened, I am just asserting that the "Big Bang" could not have, and all the "evidence" of it is a case of "scientists" trying to fit the data to the hypothesis, and as far as I'm concerned, it's just as much a 'belief system' as any other. May I suggest that instead of the entire scientific community for the last 90 years being total idiots, or conspiring together to suppress or ignore the obvious truth, it could instead be possible that you don't understand Big Bang cosmology?
Why aren't we doing the same for nearby planets. 55 Cancri I believe has a gas giant that is 4.1 times the mass of jupiter (Jupiter is 317.9 times the size of earth, making it 1303.39 times the size of earth), all well and good, but they do think there are some moons there. I'd rather be seeing some Terrestrial Planets than this personally. Seriously, we only know of less than 5 outside our solar system, and from what I read (if you find anything else, let me know) the acuall known number of Terrestrial Planets, our solar system included, is five. :P
Way to go guys, great job, you found the oldest known objects in space, I just wan't to find the aliens who gave me that probe two years ago damnit.
So TFA mentions enormous black holes.
What happens to them? What's the lifecycle? At some point do they get big enough to suck themselves into their own little inaccessable chunk of spacetime? (if so, aren't they removing vast amounts of matter from the universe? How would that affect expansion?) Or does Hawking radiation manage to eventually make a black hole evaporate away?
While I'm at it, is there any evidence that black holes attract dark matter?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It's clearly the most important one after the prime object.
Any idea if it is countably or uncountably infinite in size according to current thinking?
And is it growing within the same cardinality of infinity or is the cardinality increasing
Or is this something that we aren't even ready to think about yet?
(just incase people think I have gone completely insane countably infinite is aleph null or aleph zero and iirc is definited as being able to create a 1 to 1 mapping with the natural numbers, so N is countable infinite, as is Z and Q. R and C are uncounably infinite, R is described as having a cardinality of aleph-1 - without having a text book infront of me to quote from I dont feel comfortable going into any more detail)
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
So you see, dear friend, ever since object oriented programming was invented, the warm, fuzzy glow of the first objects has persisted ...