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TEHRAN, May 13 -By staring at the sky for over 200 hours, the Spitzer Space Telescope collected light that finally reached Earth after a 13-billion-year voyage through space.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -This light left its origin so long ago that researchers studying this imagery are essentially peering back — way back — in time, to the ancient cosmic past.
Using Spitzer data, a research team observed 135 distant galaxies and found that these celestial bodies, which formed over 13 billion years ago and just 1 billion years after the Big Bang, were brighter than expected. Researchers coupled their Spitzer findings with archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope in a recent paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
These 135 galaxies were particularly bright in two wavelengths of infrared light, which was created by radiation mingling with galactic gases like hydrogen and oxygen, according to a statement released May 9 — showing that the galaxies were releasing a high level of so-called ionizing radiation. When this type of radiation in the early universe hit abundant neutral hydrogen, it ionized it — imparting charge and kickstarting what's called the Epoch of Reionization, which coincided with the first stars' formation.
One of the biggest questions in a branch of astronomy that studies the origins of the universe, observational cosmology, is the mystery behind what produced so much of this ionizing radiation that it affected all the hydrogen in the early universe.
These galaxies might help point researchers in the right direction, because their light began its journey soon after this period, at around the time that the universe finally took the shape it appears today, soon after this period.
Source: space
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