Right now , 2019 seems like a distant memory , but astronomers routinely cast their minds back much further in meter to the very beginning of the cosmos . With the avail of theHubble Space Telescope , researcher have been able to channel out this time traveling to probe structure that live within 500 million years of the Big Bang . But a study of the deepest observations ever made of distant galaxy bunch has shew that we need to look even further into the universe ’s past times to find the very first generation of stars .
Known asPopulation III virtuoso , these star are whole composed of primordial gas ( such as atomic number 1 , He , and atomic number 3 ) left - over from the Big Bang , and void of any gravid constituent ( such as oxygen , nitrogen , carbon , and Fe ) that are constitute through appendage in star cores . A team of European researchers on the hunt for these very first stars pulled out all the stoppage , probing extragalactic nebula 10 to 100 times fainter than any antecedently observed . But even within these early galaxies ( date to around 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang ) , they found no evidence for the first generation of stars , suggest that they formed even earlier than previously thought .
To even discover these galax is an unbelievable achievement . The squad , lead by Rachana Bhatawdekar of the European Space Agency , used Hubble’sWide Field Camera 3andAdvanced Camera for Surveysto find examples of thegravitational lensing effect – when brightness level from a desktop star or galaxy is distorted by the immense gravitative sphere of an target directly in its foreground , such as a galaxy cluster . This magnifying essence , let astronomers to observe objects otherwise too weak to be detect under the scope ’s normal capabilities .
Bhatawdekar and her team , whose results will appear in an forthcoming yield of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , took this a step further and trickle out the light from the foreground coltsfoot , enable them to discover galaxies with even low masses , at aloofness equivalent to when the universe of discourse was less than a billion years old . But the stellar population within these extragalactic nebula did not contain any evidence for the baffling first gen stars .
“ These results have unsounded astrophysical consequences as they show that galaxy must have formed much earlier than we reckon , ” Bhatawdekar said in astatement .
Hope are pinned on the upcomingJames Webb Space Telescopeto probe further into the universe ’s past . possibly one day these observation will provide astronomer with the first - ever evidence of the earliest ace .
