ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606270086
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press NEW YORK
PICTURES SHOW stars 14 billion light-years away, formed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old.
The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what may be the most distant objects ever recorded, gazing billions of years into the past to produce baby pictures of what could be the first generation of stars.
``We're seeing stars that are just forming,'' said researcher Kenneth Lanzetta. ``This may be the very first burst of star formation.''
The stars are blurred together in images of embryonic galaxies captured as they appeared when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, Lanzetta said. That could be about 14 billion years ago, given plausible assumptions about the universe's expansion, he said.
The most distant of the newly spotted galaxies are about 14 billion light-years away, given those same assumptions, Lanzetta said. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 5.9 trillion miles.
These galaxies would just barely exceed the distance record held by a certain quasar, a powerful light-emitting object, said Lanzetta, an assistant professor of astronomy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
At great distances, quasars are much easier to see because they put out much more light than galaxies do. It took the Hubble's observational power to see the much fainter galaxies so far away.
Deep views into the cosmos can show objects as they appeared billions of years ago because it takes that long for their light to reach the observer.
Lanzetta and colleagues reported their analysis in today's issue of the journal Nature. They spotted about half a dozen galaxies that appear to be from the dawn of star-making - a surprisingly small number, Lanzetta said.
``What we're seeing are little clumps of stars,'' Lanzetta said. ``We see little blobs of stuff. We don't see spiral galaxies with arms.''
It's not clear whether the star clumps are isolated or regions of larger objects, he said.
Dr. Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University said the study does not prove all six galaxies are truly so far away, and therefore so old. But he said he suspects three or four of them will turn out to be as far away as Lanzetta's study says.
``He has some good candidates there,'' Windhorst said.
Mark Dickinson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore noted that the distance estimates are based on the reddish light from the galaxies. But other factors, like dust, might also make a galaxy's light red, he said.
The new study is ``enticing, but it's not a proof,'' Dickinson said. The galaxies are so faint that it will be difficult to confirm the distances by analyzing light with another telescope, he said. But an infrared camera to be installed on the Hubble next year could provide enough information to evaluate the accuracy of the distance estimates, he said.
Dickinson also said there's no guarantee that Lanzetta's team saw the first star formation to occur in the universe.
LENGTH: Medium: 59 linesby CNB