Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Shaken and Starred
Astronomers at the European Space Agency say they have evidence that shock waves unleashed by titanic galactic collisions stirred up clouds of hydrogen gas and ignited the first stars when the universe was just a billion years old.
The ESA teams trained their Infrared Space Observatory telescope at a pair of colliding galaxies called Antennae, some 60 million light years away. They noticed that overlapping regions of the galaxies were packed with vibrating hydrogen atoms.
The scientists believe that the images explain how shock waves produced by galactic collisions in the early universe "excited" clouds of hydrogen and helium and ignited the first stars. "These objects... would otherwise have taken much longer to form, since light elements such as hydrogen and helium take a long time to cool down and condense into a proto-star," ESA said in a press release. "Shock waves from the first cloud collisions may have been the helping hand."
The ESA teams trained their Infrared Space Observatory telescope at a pair of colliding galaxies called Antennae, some 60 million light years away. They noticed that overlapping regions of the galaxies were packed with vibrating hydrogen atoms.
The scientists believe that the images explain how shock waves produced by galactic collisions in the early universe "excited" clouds of hydrogen and helium and ignited the first stars. "These objects... would otherwise have taken much longer to form, since light elements such as hydrogen and helium take a long time to cool down and condense into a proto-star," ESA said in a press release. "Shock waves from the first cloud collisions may have been the helping hand."
