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Monday, December 18, 2006

The Universe's First Objects

If the sun were scaled down to the size of dime in Cincinnati, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 210 miles away, roughly in Cleveland. In reality Proxima Centauri is 4.2 lightyears away, or roughly 25 trillion miles. Scientists have recently been looking at stars 13 billion lightyears away, which they think might be the universe's oldest objects.
Astronomers might have seen the very first stars in the universe. If so, these are incredible stars, some 1,000 times as massive as the Sun.

The alternative is just as interesting: The objects might be early black holes consuming gas voraciously and spitting out radiation like crazy as nascent galaxies form.
The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, so these are very early objects.

SPACE.com -- Universe's First Objects Possibly Seen

Posted by garns at 16:32:03. Filed under: Science

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