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..."

Comments

Re:Looks like this is already being refuted

[pln2bz]

This story is very typical of space stories these days. You get some speculation from some scientists about what they expect that they should be seeing, tenuously based upon some weak observational data. A public release is put together and the news story gains steam because it invokes some concept that tickles the imagination of the public (gigantic black holes and stars, for instance). Then, when better observations come in and suggest that maybe we shouldn't be so sure of our prior speculation, there is little effort to correct the record.

It was interesting to observe that this (probable) garbage made it onto Slashdot, whereas the Stardust mission results (with actual data) did not. It seems that the space news cycle is caught in a competition to make the most outlandish claim possible in order to get the attention of the public these days. Investigating anomalies within the current paradigms has taken a backseat to wild speculation. There's little interest anymore in questioning the early assumptions that got us to this point in the first place:

Our conviction in stellar birth by way of gravitational collapse survives observations of R Corona Australis, which is generating enigmatic x-rays and 100 million degree F temperatures at a very early stage of the supposed collapse (http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050 304starbirth.htm).

Our conviction in our theories about supernovae survived observations of Supernova 1987A (see pictures at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0601 24solar3.htm), which defied traditional theories about supernovae in nearly every single respect. Even though plasma physics tells us that we can understand the structure we see in those images down to the number of beads in the smaller ring, we continue to ignore those explanations because they involve electricity in space.

Our conviction in the theory of black holes was not dampened at all by the associated problems with generating the observed quasar jet 3C273 (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9kpgc 4td), which extends 100,000 light years -- even though the lifetime of the X-ray producing particles is only about 100 years.

And then there's the Stardust mission -- which when combined with the results of the Deep Impact mission indicate quite clearly that our early assumptions about comets were quite wrong. Scientists are now apparently trying to invent scenarios for how it could be that comets would contain exotic meteorite particles as well as particles that have clearly been formed under intense heat. Perhaps they should consider that these initial speculations were wrong in the first place. I doubt we'll see any such sanity though. More likely, we'll see additional new speculations to support the earlier unsupported speculations.

There increasingly seems to be far less glory these days in doing the homework that we'll be graded on and far more interest in fantasizing about multi-dimensional space and gigantic black holes.