Fringy, science-stuff, maybe fact or fiction?

From the Ashes of the First Stars

What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to be supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though, with even the nature of the surrounding gas still unknown. 

Exacting observations of three distant quasars now indicate emission of very specific colors of the element iron. These Hubble Space Telescope observations, which bolster recent results from the WMAP mission, indicate that a whole complete cycle of stars was born, created this iron, and died within the first few hundred million years of the universe.

Image credit: NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al. (STECF)


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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 11:11 | link | comments (2)

Comments:

#1  31 May 2007 - 13:58

 

oh yeah. wallpapers by norman continues for the blue moon today. magnificent. thanks!

limine

#2  31 May 2007 - 18:03

 

Blue moon. Two full moons in one month? Or the the Tunguska, Siberian comet that thru a bunch of dust into the atmoshere, yielding something equivalent to many fission bombs, giving the moon a blue glow in 1908?

I don't know.

But a blue moon is beautiful, romantic, and makes us mortals feel anchored to what gives life to us, our planet. Let's all of us try to stop the destruction of our enviroment. I wish we all could live in peace.

Norman

Anonymous

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