Astronomers made an incredible discovery: they discovered in space the most real "fossil" cloud - a relic gas formed during the Big Bang.
The new discovery gave the world unique information about the origin of the universe and its early composition. Now scientists have finally gotten a chance to find out why some stars and entire galaxies formed from gas and some did not.
“Everywhere we look, the gas in the universe is contaminated with heavy elements - the products of the explosion of stars. However, this particular cloud appears to be intact even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang,”the researchers explain. The team was led by Fred Robert and Michael Murphy, both from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Their results are going to be published in the astronomical journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, but they also made them available on the arXiv server.
Astronomers have spotted the fossil cloud from an extremely bright quasar - a space object that emits large amounts of energy - behind it. The spectrometer readings made it clear that the density of the cloud is extremely low, which led scientists to think about the "real relic of the Big Bang", since it was not affected in any way by the particles that fill the rest of the galaxy. Such objects began to be found in space quite recently, only in 2011. Astronomers hope that it is thanks to them that it will be possible to look into the past and see the Universe as it was at the time of its inception.
Vasily Makarov