The Birth of Stars & Planets

According to current science, space, time and matter originated 13.7 billion years ago in a tremendous explosion called the Big Bang. A few hundred million years later, the first stars formed, ending the "dark age" of the universe. Astronomers believe the objects observed by the Spitzer telescope are either the first stars — hundreds of times more massive than our sun -- or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If they turn out to be stars, then the clusters might be the first mini-galaxies. Our own Milky Way was probably created when mini-galaxies like these merged. The first stars in our universe are long gone, but their light still shines, giving us a peek at what the universe looked like in its early years. Astrophysicists believe they’ve spotted a faint glow from stars born at the beginning of time. Harvey Moseley, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says, "The reason they're faint is just because they're very, very far away, they're over at the far edge of the universe." After the big bang, the universe stayed dark for about 200 million years. Now, new pictures reveal the first light from objects 13 billion light years away, the infants of our universe. "So, we're seeing what sometimes people call the first light in the universe, which formed after the big bang," Dr. Moseley explains. Using pictures taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists first removed light from ...

Channel: YouTube Video Length: 8m 57s Date Found: Sun, May 31 2009 6:05 PM Category: Technology Date Produced: Sat, May 30 2009 3:03 PM View Count: 0