Researchers at Texas A&M have yet to see images of the beginning of the universe. But they're getting closer.
Two A&M astronomers, along with fellow team members from the University of Massachusetts and two astronomical institutes, spent the last eight months studying the characteristics of the most distant galaxies scientists have seen.
To do so, they have interpreted images that show galaxies from about 13 billion years ago, which is "only" 700 million years after the big bang.
They were able to do so using images and data from a new camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that orbits Earth. The camera, called Wide Field Camera 3, can see into the far reaches of space, beyond any images ever seen before.
Multiple scientists have produced papers on the images, some of which were published within weeks.
The camera also can detect light that is more red or blue than the human eye can see. That technology is important, scientists said, because the universe is expanding and the Doppler effect stretches light from far-off galaxies moving away from Earth, making the light appear more red. The farther away a galaxy is, the more red it appears, scientists said.
A&M researchers Steven Finkelstein and Casey Papovich used images and data from the camera, which are available to the public through NASA, to try to learn about the state of galaxies soon after the big bang, the tremendous explosion that scientists say caused the universe to expand. They identified 35 galaxies in the images provided.
"These are the most distant things anyone has found," Papovich said.
Because they are so far away, the light that they emitted took 13 billion years to reach the camera. Therefore, the camera is almost looking back into time and seeing what galaxies looked like 700 million years after the big bang.
The goal, the scientists say, was to determine the physical make-up of the young galaxies. This will help them understand how galaxies are evolving, "which we can turn around and use to probe the conditions at the beginning of the Universe," the scientists wrote on their Web site for the A&M Department of Physics and Astronomy.
What they found was that the stars in the galaxies had elements other than hydrogen and helium, which were the two elements scientists say were formed in the big bang. Therefore, these galaxies had evolved since the beginning of the universe, where there would be no metals and no dust, the scientists said.
That means that scientists will have to wait until more powerful telescopes are developed -- perhaps the James Webb Space Telescope expected to be launched into space in 2014 -- that will see farther into space and show them the first-ever galaxies.
Finkelstein and Papovich began studying the Wide Field Camera 3 images when they were made available in May. They presented a paper on their results to the American Astronomical Society in Washington earlier this month. On Friday, they will present a more accessible version of their findings at an open house at the Texas A&M Campus Observatory.
The open house is free, open to all members of the public and will last from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Guests may park at the Brayton Fire Training Center and take a free charter bus to the observatory.
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