Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The First Stars Continued


Here is the image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. An infrared telescope allows us to see objects at high redshifts. The right image shows stars and galaxies in Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The left image shows the same patch of sky after foreground objects have been removed by computer.

Like the Cosmic Microwave Background image this resembles, there is room for interpretation. Some have argued that the WMAP team did not properly remove foreground objects from the CMB, leading to misinterpretations of the data. Simulations by Tom Abell and others have attempted to reconstruct the first stars. These in the Spitzer photograph are 10 times as massive as the simulations suggested. Presence of primordial singularities might explain this discrepancy.

3 Comments:

Blogger nige said...

Those pics remind me of a painting I did of the sky when I was about five! ;-)

3:29 AM  
Blogger L. Riofrio said...

Hee hee, you did a good job predicting the Universe! Sometimes children are better at understanding the world than adults. When they write your bio, maybe they will mention the painting.

10:10 AM  
Blogger nige said...

Ha ha...

Happy Christmas

4:29 AM  

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