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NASA Sees Glow of Universe's First Objects

Posted by kdawson on from the first-post dept.

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..."

3 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Re:1000 Times the mass of the Sun? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Google video has a vivid short movie relating the size of planets to the larger stars we know about.

    "W CEPHEI" wins this video at 288194 times the size of the earth!

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  2. Re:Almost there... by complete+loony · · Score: 3, Interesting
    No. In the grandparent's explanation c did not change. It was the distance between 2 points that changed, not the speed of light. The early photon took a year to travel from point A to point B, if it was reflected back again it will take longer to get back to point A because the universe has expanded and point A is now further away. Point A may be practically unreachable by that photon as the expansion of the universe keeps moving point A further away.

    v = d / t

    The velocity of a photon (c) is a constant. Space is malleable, and both d and t can change.

    --
    09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
  3. Re:Almost there... by snarkth · · Score: 5, Interesting


      The expansion of space itself is not constrained by the speed of light, only the matter/energy within it.

      Read Inflation for Beginners which is an excellent, relatively (argh) non-technical treatment of the subject.

      Relevant quote: "One of the peculiarities of inflation is that it seems to take place faster than the speed of light. Even light takes 30 billionths of a second (3 x 10(exp-10) sec) to cross a single centimetre, and yet inflation expands the Universe from a size much smaller than a proton to 10 cm across in only 15 x 10(exp-33) sec. This is possible because it is spacetime itself that is expanding, carrying matter along for the ride; nothing is moving through spacetime faster than light, either during inflation or ever since. Indeed, it is just because the expansion takes place so quickly that matter has no time to move while it is going on and the process "freezes in" the original uniformity of the primordial quantum bubble that became our Universe."

      I don't know what you mean by "information coming from apparently nowhere."

      snarkth