By observing a larger section of the screen, you would be able to resolve both small- and large-scale patterns, further confirming your initial suspicion. It would be hard to know for certain if a suspected pattern was real. Imagine trying to find a pattern in the noise in an old-fashioned television set by looking at just a small piece of the screen. The new study improves on previous observations by measuring this cosmic infrared background out to scales equivalent to two full moons - significantly larger than what was detected before. The light would have originated at visible or even ultraviolet wavelengths and then, because of the expansion of the universe, stretched out to the longer, infrared wavelengths observed by Spitzer. Astronomers say some of that “first light” might have traveled billions of years to reach the Spitzer Space Telescope. With time, it cooled and, by around 500 million years later, the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take shape. The Universe formed roughly 13.7 billion years ago in a fiery, explosive Big Bang. “This is teaching us that the sources, or the “sparks,” are intensely burning their nuclear fuel.” “We can gather clues from the light of the Universe’s first fireworks,” said Kashlinsky. You ultimately would be left with a fuzzy map of how the fireworks are distributed, but they would still be too distant to make out individually. First, you would have to remove all the foreground lights between the two cities, as well as the blazing lights of New York City itself. Kashlinsky likens the observations to looking for Fourth of July fireworks in New York City from Los Angeles. The lumps in the pattern observed are consistent with the way the very distant objects are thought to be clustered together. Rather than being left with a black, empty patch of sky, they found faint patterns of light with several telltale characteristics of the cosmic infrared background. The team then carefully subtracted all the known stars and galaxies in the images. Kashlinsky and his colleagues used Spitzer to look at two patches of sky for more than 400 hours each. Now, Spitzer is in the extended phase of its mission, during which it performs more in-depth studies on specific patches of the sky. This isn’t the first time astronomers have used Spitzer to search for the very first stars and black holes, and back in 2005 they saw hints of this remote pattern of light, known as the cosmic infrared background, and again with more precision in 2007. Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Telescope, which will tell us exactly what and where these first objects were.” “We can’t yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe, but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a glimpse of an ancient epoch. “These objects would have been tremendously bright,” said Alexander “Sasha” Kashlinsky from the Goddard Space Flight Center, lead author of a new paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal. While they are too faint and distant to figure out what the individual objects are – they may be massive stars or voracious black holes – Spitzer has captured what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light, revealing these first objects were numerous and furiously burned cosmic fuel. The Spitzer Space Telescope has looked back in time to see what scientists called the “faint, lumpy glow” given off by the very first objects in the Universe, and these ancient objects obviously provided some early cosmic fireworks.
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