Keck goes back, back, back
Advertiser Staff
WAIMEA, Hawai'i — Mauna Kea's W.M. Keck Observatory once again is being credited with helping astronomers probe deeper into space to uncover the origins of the universe.
European Space Agency, NASA, Robert A.E. Fosbury (European Space Agency/Space Telescope-European Coordinating Facility, Germany)
The latest discovery was announced yesterday by astronomers who said the twin 33-foot telescopes allowed them to study a newly identified star-forming region from the very early days of the universe, when it was less than 2 billion years old.
An artist's concept of a star-forming region from the time when the universe was less than 2 billion years old.
Called the Lynx Arc, after the constellation in which it appears, this super-cluster is about 1 million times brighter and 8 million times farther away than the Orion Nebula, a nearby "star birth" region in the Milky Way that is visible with small telescopes, according to a news release from the Keck Observatory.
The discovery was made by an international team of collaborators led by Bob Fosbury of the European Space Agency's Space Telescope-European Coordinating Facility in Germany, which used the powerful Keck telescopes to conduct part of the research.
"What is fascinating about this galaxy is that it appears to be making incredibly massive stars, much larger than almost any star we see inside our own galaxy, and the galaxy has made a huge number of them," said team member Bradford Holden of the University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory at Santa Cruz. "We are not watching the actual birth of a galaxy, but rather a galaxy going through an enormous growth spurt."
Researchers said the Keck observations helped show that the one million-plus stars in the Lynx Arc are more than twice as hot as the Orion Nebula's central stars, with surface temperatures up to 144,000 degrees Fahrenheit. However, stars forming from the original, pristine gas in the early universe can be more massive and, consequently, much hotter, perhaps up to 216,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Such super-hot stars are thought to be the first luminous objects to condense after the "Big Bang" cooled, the release said. The "Big Bang" is a cosmic explosion believed to have occurred about 13 billion years ago or more that is at the center of a theory to explain the origin of matter.
Astronomers believe that these first monster stars formed considerably earlier than the Lynx Arc — up to 1.8 billion years earlier.
"This remarkable object is the closest we have come so far to seeing what such primordial objects might look like when our telescopes become powerful enough to see them," Fosbury said.
