45. FIRST STARS

The first stars may have 
lighted up the cosmos 
within 200 to 400 million 
years after the Big Bang, 
and then clustered together 
into what later became 
galaxies .

On November 2, 2005, a team of astronomers (including Alexander Kashlinsky, Richard G. Arendt, John Mather, and S. Harvey Moseley) using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope announced the detection of near-infrared light that may radiated from the the very first stars and/or from hot gas falling into the first black holes more than 13 billion years ago . Based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the team captured a diffuse glow of infrared light six-months apart in Constellation Draco after the removal of light attributed to stars, galaxies, and artifacts of telescopic observation. The resulting near-infrared image shows a field of merging blobs of light that may have beem radiated by extremely massive Population III stars and/or superheated gas near black hole horizons within 200 to 400 million years after the Big Bang. Such a strong signal was detected that the first stars are deduced to be very massive stars, much bigger than those seen today. They may have been hundreds of times as massive as Sol, burning out in just a few million years but emitting vast amounts of ultraviolet radiation which was stretched out as the Universe expanded, leaving an infrared signature.