The ancient gas cloud, which probably has not changed much since the Big Bang, was discovered in a distant part of the Universe with the help of the most powerful optical telescope in the world, the observatory named after it. Keca, located on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The discovery of this incredibly rare astronomical object, made by a group of astronomers led by doctoral student Fred Robert and Professor Michael Murphy from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, provides new, valuable information about the formation processes of the first galaxies of the Universe.
Everywhere, no matter where we look, the gas in the Universe is“ polluted ”by heavy elements produced by explosions of massive stars, said Robert. “However, this particular cloud looks absolutely“ virgin, ”even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
If it contains heavy elements, then their concentration should be less than 1/10000 of their concentration in the substance of the Sun. This is an incredibly low content; one of the most convincing evidence that this cloud has survived since the Big Bang.
Robert and his team used two tools observatory them. Keck – Echellette Spectrograph and Imager (ESI) and High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) – for observing the spectrum of a quasar located in the background relative to the gas cloud under study. Earlier, the same researchers observed in a similar way two similar gas clouds, but then the observations were made by chance. In this new study, for the first time, a systematic search method was able to detect a gas cloud with an incredibly low metal content.
An ancient cloud of gas preserved from the time of the Big Bang
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