Embers.
Hidden within an interstellar gas cloud like this one, astronomers detected glowing remnants of the big bang.

Credit: ESA/NASA/Yäel Nazé (University of Liège, Belgium)/You-Hua Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)

Taking the Young Universe's Temperature

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
12 May 2008

Astronomers have nabbed an important bit of data about the early universe that had eluded them for 25 years. An international team studying gas clouds in a distant galaxy has found that the temperature of the gas matches almost exactly what models predicted for the young cosmos. The finding confirms that these models are on the right track and provides a nearly ironclad case for the big bang.

Astronomers have developed complicated models to explain what happened after the big bang some 13.7 billion years ago. By and large, observations have supported those models, including measurements of how heat created by the big bang dispersed. Some mysteries remain, however, such as why it took galaxies only a couple of billion years to form after atoms had emerged. Astronomers also didn't know whether the models held up as the universe cooled and expanded in its earliest ages.

An international team used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope array to observe gas clouds in a very distant galaxy. The clouds are so far away--about 11 billion light-years--that they can't be seen directly. So the team picked clouds that were perfectly aligned between Earth and an even more distant quasar, the most brilliant type of object in the universe. The quasar functioned as a kind of beacon shining through the gas.

The researchers detected molecules of carbon monoxide and two forms of hydrogen in the clouds, they report today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. And from data indicating the motion of the molecules within the clouds, they calculated that the temperature of the clouds was 9.15 kelvin. That's almost exactly what the models predicted.

The data also reveal a lot about star formation within the galaxy, says astrophysicist and team leader Raghunathan Srianand of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India. Given the chemical composition, temperature, and density of the gas, "the star formation in this galaxy must have happened at a rate five times faster than that in the Milky Way," he says, which suggests why the early galaxies could form so quickly.

Astrophysicists are welcoming the findings. The data on abundance of carbon monoxide and hydrogen provide "a new window into star formation in the early universe," says David Spergel of Princeton University. Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, adds that this is "a wonderful detection," because it provides new information on cosmic evolution at an earlier phase than previously observed. And Volker Bromm of the University of Texas, Austin, calls the research "very nice work that bodes well" for detecting more molecules in very distant galaxies.

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