One “tile” of the Murchison Wide-field Array telescope in Australia. In preparation for looking for the first generation of galaxies, the facility has published the first catalogue of extragalactic sources of contamination in one of the fields of view. Image credit: Murchison Wide-field Array.The epoch when the very first stars appeared is a key period of cosmic history. These stars began the manufacture of the chemical elements (those heavier than hydrogen and helium) and their light began the reionisation of the neutral cosmic gas. These stars thus mark the dawn of the universe as we know it today and the start of the so-called Epoch of Reionisation. The term “reionisation” refers to the process whereby these atoms are prompted (by the ultraviolet light from new stars) to shed some of their electrons. Astronomers estimate that this period occurred a few hundred million years or so after the Big Bang.
Schematic timeline of the universe, depicting reionisation’s place in cosmic history. Click the graphic for a larger-scale version. Illustration credit: Caltech/NASA.Neutral hydrogen atoms were the dominant element in the universe from the time they first arose, about 380,000 years after the big bang, until the Epoch of Reionisation. Astronomers are now constructing facilities like the radio telescope Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) to search for light from the hydrogen atoms at the dawn of this Epoch, a daunting task not only because the sources are so distant and faint, but also because there are so many other galaxies from much later cosmic times lying in the way and contaminating our lines-of-sight, as well as more local sources of contamination.
CfA astronomers Lincoln Greenhill, Justin Kasper (now at Michigan), and Avi Loeb were members of a large team of scientists that used the MWA during its early commissioning phase of operations to develop a catalogue of foreground sources that could be likely sources of confusion. The MWA currently consists of 128 groupings (“tiles”) of sixteen antennae each arranged in four-by-four squares and sensitive to radiation around a metre in wavelength. The unusual telescope pattern meant that the team had to learn how to properly reduce and analyse the complex resulting data, and much of the effort in this research was devoted to these tasks.
The astronomers successfully identified 7,394 extragalactic sources which could be confused with earlier-epoch galaxies in their first field of the sky under study. Nearly all of these objects were associated with previously known galaxies, but twenty-five of them are previously unknown, and all of them have now been characterised. The results both demonstrate the practicality of the MWA performance and are a first step toward assembling a database for the precise subtraction of foreground radiation to uncover nascent galaxies in the early universe.
Astronomers studying the birth of planetary systems in the young (about 2-3 million years old) star forming region IC348 in Perseus as seen by the infrared cameras onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope have found thirteen stars in this complex with detectable discs, none of which is as massive as our early solar system’s disc.
University of Florida astronomers have discovered the first “binary-binary” — two massive companions around one star in a close binary system, one so-called giant planet and one brown dwarf, or “failed star.” For such large companion objects to be stable so close together defies our current popular theories on how solar systems form.
The collection of rocky planets orbiting distant stars has just grown by one, and the latest discovery is the most intriguing yet. Known as GJ 1132b, the newfound world lies just 39 light-years away. Although hot as an oven, the 9,200 mile-wide planet is cool enough to potentially host an atmosphere. If it does, we could study that atmosphere in detail with the Hubble Space Telescope and future observatories like the Giant Magellan Telescope.
