Astronomers may have detected the dawn's early light — light from around the dawn of the universe. Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland believe they have captured traces of radiation from long-extinguished stars that were "born" during the universe's infancy.
The research represents the first tangible — but not conclusive — evidence of these earliest stars, which are thought to have produced the raw materials from which future stars, including our sun, were created.
The Big Bang, the explosion believed to have created the universe, is thought to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. About 100 million years later, hydrogen atoms began to merge and ignite, creating brightly burning stars. Just what these stars were like wasn't clear.
"Where they lived, how big they were, how much light they emitted, whether they even existed, we weren't sure," said astrophysicist Alexander Kashlinsky, the lead author of the article appearing in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "What we've done, we think, is obtain the first information about these stars."
Continued...http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051103/ap_on_sc/early_stars
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