Category: Cosmology

We now know the Universe is around 13.7 billion years old. But just a few years ago, cosmologists had no idea, putting the range around 10-20 billion years old – some even thought it could be 100 billion years old. We can thank NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe for giving us the concrete answer. And now, NASA released 5 years of data collection, telling astronomers more about the earliest moments in the Universe, the background sea of cosmic neutrinos and the end of the Dark Ages.

WMAP looks at the Universe with microwave eyes. It may sound like a strange wavelength to use when witnessing the highest energy event ever – the aftermath of the Big Bang. But there’s a trick, over the billions of years of time, the Universe has been expanding. Radiation has had its wavelengths stretched out across the billions of light-years of distance and expansion. The visible light after the Big Bang has become a diffuse glow of microwaves in all directions.

Astronomers use WMAP to study the subtle temperature variations in this microwave background radiation to understand what the Universe looked like at the very beginning.

This 5th anniversary release of data is the icing on the cake, with some significant new findings.

First up, WMAP found evidence for a background sea of cosmic neutrinos that permeate the background of the Universe. These almost weightless sub-atomic particles zip around at nearly the speed of light. In fact, there are millions passing through your body right now, blasted out from the Sun. They don’t interact with anything, so they don’t cause any harm. In fact, a neutrino could probably make it through several light years of solid lead without being stopped.

So, in addition to the solar neutrinos there seem to be a sea of background neutrinos, generated during the Universe’s early development.

The second big discovery is clear evidence that the first generation of stars took more than a half-billion years to create a cosmic fog.

“We now have evidence that the creation of this fog was a drawn-out process, starting when the universe was about 400 million years old and lasting for half a billion years,” said WMAP team member Joanna Dunkley of the University of Oxford in the U.K. and Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. “These measurements are currently possible only with WMAP.”

Finally, WMAP put in tight constraints on the concept of “inflation”. This was an incredible burst of growth in the first trillionth of a second of the Universe. This period of inflation left ripples in the fabric of space, detectable in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

All in all, it’s been a good 5 years for WMAP.

Original Source: NASA News Release

So how do rare massive stars grow 10 to 150 times the mass of our Sun? It turns out that a standard star-forming nebula is way too cold for big stars to form. So how can these clouds of gas and dust be prepared so massive stars can develop? Answer: Let small stars do the hard work and heat that nebula up…

This is the ultimate stellar crèche. Star-forming nebulae are vast regions of space filled with gas and dust. Proto-stars need a lot of hydrogen to form and begin fusion reactions in their young cores. The bigger the nebula, the bigger the star… or so you’d think.

The problem with these young nebulae is that they are cold; in fact they are very cold. Typical interstellar clouds of hydrogen have temperatures very close to absolute zero (the lowest temperature possible) due to the lack of heat in the far-off reaches of the cosmos. Cold clouds will fragment very easily, breaking up and forming smaller clouds of hydrogen. Eventually they will collapse to form stars, but these stars will be very small due to the lack of fuel in the nebula fragment. If this is the case, how are massive stars – the ones responsible for producing heavy elements including anything heavier than helium – formed at all? Surely all clouds of dust and gas are cold, and therefore fragment, only producing small stars?

From research published in Nature this weekby Christopher F. McKee (a professor from UC Berkeley) and Mark R. Krumholz (Hubble postdoctoral fellow at Princeton), there is a possible solution to this problem. Perhaps young stars provide a heating source to warm up the surrounding nebula, preventing the surrounding gas from fragmenting, allowing it to collapse into progressively bigger stars.

Starting at temperatures only 10-20 degrees above absolute zero, clouds heated by young stars may increase in temperatures three-fold. However, researchers realize that a massive star-forming cloud needs to be several hundred degrees warmer than absolute zero to prevent the whole cloud from fragmenting, they also understand that the “zone of heating” for each small star is limited in less dense clouds. This situation changes when the star-forming cloud is dense. The zone of influence each small star has will encompass the whole nebula. This collaborative heating effect by the small stars prevents fragmentation and allows larger volumes of gas to collapse, forming massive stars.

“It’s only the formation of these low-mass stars that heats up the cloud enough to cut off the fragmentation. It is as if the cold molecular cloud starts on the process of making low-mass stars but then, because of heating, that fragmentation is stopped and the rest of the gas goes into one large star.” – Christopher F. McKee.

A warmer cloud is a bigger cloud, providing more fuel, allowing massive stars to form. It is the ultimate stellar nursery; massive stars can only form once their smaller (and older) siblings warm up the cosmic nest for them to thrive.

View the stunning simulation of a massive star forming in a warm cloud (24Mb, .mpg)

Source: UC Berkley News