Probable images of some of the earliest forming stars in the Universe were recently captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, giving us a glimpse back into the early Universe shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
While NASA scientists aren't entirely sure what the objects in the images are, (they are too distant to make out individually) what they are fairly certain of is that they show a brightly burning collection of cosmic matter shortly after the formation of the universe, be they giant stars or black holes.
The images were taken in infrared by Spitzer, which first surveyed the region in 2005, and then once more in 2007, as it scanned the vastness of space for regions of interest. Now in the advanced phase of its mission, Spitzer is zeroing in on those areas of interest with the greatest precision possible, which allowed it to pick up the images of this ancient epoch.
The process was by no means an easy one for scientists, who spent hundreds of hours eliminating known stars and galaxies from the image. Rather than being left with the expected blackness of space after subtraction, they instead were left with several notable patches of infrared light, patches which were consistent with how distant stellar objects are clustered together.
The light would have travelled billions of years before being picked up by Spitzer, first as ultraviolet or optical light, and then finally the infrared that Spitzer is able to detect. This change in the wavelengths of the light would be caused by the expansion of the Universe stretching it out.
While the latest images from Spitzer are bound to cause excitement in the scientific community, they are just a stepping stone to the more powerful James Webb Telescope, an $8.8 billion project currently scheduled for launch in 2018, which will be capable of providing a much more detailed look at far flung corners of the Universe.
"Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for NASA's upcoming James Webb Telescope, which will tell us exactly what and where these first objects were," said Alexander Kashlinsky, lead author of the paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.
