Space

Peering Back into the Universe's Past

Researchers create the most detailed infrared map of the early universe

By Gabriel Gache, Science News Editor

9th of April 2008, 08:11 GMT

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Take a patch of the sky with an area four times that of the apparent size of the Moon, study it over a period of three years and you may obtain the most sensitive infrared map of the distant universe.

By doing so, researchers from the University of Nottingham obtained the image of more than 100,000 galaxies, as they appeared in the early days of the universe.

Because light does not travel instantaneously through space, we are actually able to observe galaxies as they looked more than 10 billion years ago and study them while in their infancy. Nevertheless, as light travels over great distances, its wavelength is being shifted towards the infrared wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

"I would compare these observations to the ice core drilled deep into the Antarctic. Just as they allow us to peer back in time, our ultra-deep image allows us to look back and observe galaxies evolving at different stage in cosmic history, all the way back to just 1 billion years after the Big Bang," said Dr Sebastien Faucaud, presenting the results of the study at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting.

The main goal of astronomers around the world is to discover massive galaxies in the distant universe. "We see galaxies 10 times the mass of the Milky Way Already in place at very early epochs. Now, for the first time, we are sampling a large enough volume of the distant universe to be able to see them in sufficient numbers and really pin down when they were formed."

The study was based on images taken with the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and is part of the Ultra-Deep Survey program initiate nearly three years ago. "As we keep taking images over the next few years, we will see ever more distant galaxies," concluded professor Andy Lawrence from the University of Edinburgh.

TAGS:

universe | galaxy | light | big bang | infrared

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