European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: Max-Planck Institut für extraterrestrische Physik

An international team of astronomers from Germany and Japan has discovered the most distant cluster of galaxies known so far – 9.6 billion light years away. The X-ray and infrared observations showed that the cluster hosts predominantly old, massive galaxies, demonstrating that the galaxies formed when the universe was still very young. These and similar observations therefore provide new information not only about early galaxy evolution but also about history of the universe as a whole.(read more)

Source: Space Daily

Evolution of the Universe. Credit: NASA/WMAP

Sophisticated new technologies created by NASA and university scientists are enabling them to build an instrument designed to probe the first moments of the universe’s existence.

Former NASA scientist Chuck Bennett, now an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Md., won a $5-million National Science Foundation grant to build a new ground-based instrument, the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS). Bennett is building CLASS with his collaborators at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Goddard will provide most of the instrument’s sophisticated detectors and other state-of-the-art technologies that will allow the scientists to test the “inflation theory” of the universe’s origin. (read more)

Source: arXiv

The addition of Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has led to a dramatic increase in our ability to study the z > 6 Universe. The increase in the near-infrared (NIR) sensitivity of WFC3 over previous instruments has enabled us to reach apparent magnitudes approaching 29 (AB).  This allows us to probe the rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) continuum, redshifted into the NIR at z >6.

In this research the authors study the rest-UV luminosity function, and hence estimate the integrated star formation rate within 800Myr after Big Bang. Understanding the global star formation history at these redshifts is crucial in answering the question whether the UV photons produced by the short-lived OB stars were sufficient to reionize the Universe.

The studied leads to the conclusion that some reionization of the the primordial Universe seems to have been possible.

This paper was submitted to MNRAS on February 25th, 2010. (read more)

Link:

Paper submitted to MNRAS

Source: arXiv

Artist’s impression of the heart of a quasar, where a black hole is hidden in a disk of gas and dust.
Credit: NASA Education and Public Outreach at Sonoma State University – Aurore Simonnet.

The thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) provides an indirect probe of both the HI and He II reionisation epochs. Current constraints on the IGM temperature from the Lyα  forest are restricted to the redshift range 2 z 4.5, limiting the ability to probe the thermal memory of HI reionisation toward higher redshift. In this work, the authors using  a high resolution Keck/HIRES spectrum in combination with detailed numerical modelling present the first direct measurement of the IGM temperature around a z = 6 quasar by analysing the Doppler widths of Ly_ absorption lines in the proximity zone of SDSS J0818+1722.(read more)

Source: Space Pragmatism

CMB as expected to be seen by Planck. Credit: ESA

Herschel and Planck were launched on May 14th 2009. After the appropriate operations of both missions the Space Telescopes are now in orbit around the Lagrangian point L2. Herschel has already begun to deliver impressive pictures some time ago quite ahead of schedule.

Planck has a much more difficult mission because after the COBE mission it also has to have a better image  of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) than WMAP.  Preliminary results presented on September 19th, 2009, said the the acquired data was excelent. What is happened with Planck?

It seems mission teams are working but results won’t be visible for a while. (read more)

Links:

Planck Mission

Source: NASA/ESA News Release – heic1001

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. The data from the Hubble’s new infrared camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), on the Ultra Deep Field (taken in August 2009) have been analysed by five international teams of astronomers. Some of these early results are being presented by various team members on 6 January 2010, at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC, USA. (read more)

Source: German Aerospace Center

In the field of archaeology the age of finds or the time of events can sometimes be determined relatively easily, for example via the number of tree rings or the rate of decomposition of radioactive elements. However, there is unfortunately no direct and absolute indicator for the age of the Universe. Astronomers have, however, found two ways to arrive at a good estimate.

Astronomers have ultimately calculated that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old. (read more)

Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Using the recently updated Hubble Space Telescope (HST) two teams of UK astronomers have identified galaxies which are likely to be the most distant yet seen. The UK teams, one led by Andrew Bunker and Stephen Wilkins at the University of Oxford and the other by Ross McLure and Jim Dunlop at the University of Edinburgh, share their results in forthcoming papers in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Read more

Image shows a portion of the Hubble Deep Field, with a potentially very distant galaxy marked by the cross-hairs.
(Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI)