Science

Astronomers Detect Signal from Universe's Earliest Stars

March 02, 2018 04:28·
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"The apparent detection of the signature of the first stars in the Universe will be a revolutionary discovery if it stands the tests of time", said Nobel Prize-awarded astrophysicist Brian Schmidt of The Australian National University.

With those tools in place, the researchers set up the EDGES antennae in the desert to eliminate as much radio noise as possible, selecting an isolated site at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Australia, run by that nation's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

These findings, published in another paper in Nature, have thrown a spanner in the work of the theoretical physicists.

"Finding this minuscule signal has opened a new window on the early universe", Judd Bowman, lead researcher of the University of Arizona's Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature (EDGES) project, said in a CSIRO media release on Thursday.

"This is the first time we've seen any signal from this early in the Universe, aside from the afterglow of the Big Bang", Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University who led the work, said in a statement.

Astronomers discovered evidence of the first light of some of the first stars.

Ordinary matter has been heating up since the Big Bang but the dark matter has been cooling down. "This would provide the first glimpse of physics beyond the standard model". Further discoveries with more sensitive receivers and less complications from terrestrial radio interference - which could be achieved by placing an interferometer on the dark side of the moon - could unveil more details about the nature of dark matter, maybe even probing the speed at which it is moving.

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However, he noted that such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "What makes me a bit nervous is the fact that the [signal] doesn't look like what we expected", Loeb told Science News.

This artist's illustration shows the universe's first, massive, blue stars in gaseous filaments, with the cosmic microwave background just visible at the edges. The signals detected in the radio study came from primordial hydrogen, at a time that light from the first stars made the gas detectible for the first time. It's causing hydrogen to start absorbing the background radiation, so you start seeing it in silhouette, at particular radio frequencies'. Thus, hydrogen atoms over the universe started to absorb background radiation - a significant change that the researchers could distinguish as radio waves. Such dips occur at wavelengths between 65 megahertz (MHz) and 95 MHz, overlapping with some of the most widely used frequencies on the FM radio dial, as well as booming radio waves emanating naturally from the Milky Way galaxy.

"There is a great technical challenge to making this detection", according to Peter Kurczynski, program director for Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation in the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. "It's like being in the middle of a hurricane and trying to hear the flap of a hummingbird's wing".

This updated timeline of the Universe reflects the discovery that the first stars emerged by 180 million years after the Big Bang. Click on the image for a larger version.

Over the next 100 million years, gravity pulled dense regions of the early universe's neutral hydrogen gas together until the force was so strong, these balls of gas collapsed in on themselves to form stars. That implies that there could be something amiss about the observations, or that a significant effect hasn't been accounted for.

Certain characteristics in the detected signal also suggest that hydrogen gas, and the Universe as a whole, must have been twice as cold as scientists previously estimated, with a temperature of about 3 Kelvins (minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 270 degrees Celsius).

The findings are likely to spark debate among other astronomers, and a rush to confirm or refute the observations using other instruments. The research was supported by NSF awards AST-0905990, AST-1207761, and AST-1609450, amounting to $1.64 million.

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