Etewassilmews » 20 апр 2013, 09:09
Astronomers caught a glimpse of one galaxy as it looked merely 880 million years after the big bang, and what they see indicates that stars began forming in the universe much earlier than researchers had thought possible. The study, which was published April 17 in the journal Nature, is based on photographs that the European Space Agency’s Herschel telescope recently took of a galaxy located nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth.
Since it would have taken the light from that galaxy almost 13 billion years to reach our planet, the photograph is an image of that galaxy as it would have looked almost 13 billion years ago. That means that the astronomers are seeing the galaxy as it would have appeared a mere 880 million years after the big bang.
Astronomers caught a glimpse of one galaxy as it looked merely 880 million years after the big bang, and what they see indicates that stars began forming in the universe much earlier than researchers had thought possible. The study, which was published April 17 in the journal Nature, is based on photographs that the European Space Agency’s Herschel telescope recently took of a galaxy located nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth.
Since it would have taken the light from that galaxy almost 13 billion years to reach our planet, the photograph is an image of that galaxy as it would have looked almost 13 billion years ago. That means that the astronomers are seeing the galaxy as it would have appeared a mere 880 million years after the big bang.
