3 November 2005

Early stars: lifting the veil

The most distant and oldest observable stars are in the metal-rich galaxies
seen in images such as the Hubble ultra-deep field. The metal - which in
cosmology is anything that's not hydrogen or helium - must have come from
somewhere and as nucleosynthesis happens in stars, there must have been an
earlier population of metal-free stars. No existing or planned telescopes
can detect them individually, but evidence of their existence has been found
hidden in images obtained by the Infrared Array Camera onboard NASA's
Spitzer Space Telescope. After removing foreground stars and galaxies from
the image, the tiny fluctuations that remain in the cosmic infrared
background are the fossil of emissions from the old metal-free stars.

Full Text at Nature (Only the Abstracts and Summaries are free)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7064/edsumm/e051103-08.html

News and Views: Cosmology: The infrared dawn of starlight
The modest-sized but successful Spitzer Space Telescope has detected
fluctuations in cosmic light at infrared frequencies. Is this the signature
of the first population of stars that formed in the Universe?

Richard S. Ellis

Article
: Tracing the first stars with fluctuations of the cosmic infrared
background
A. Kashlinsky, R. G. Arendt, J. Mather and S. H. Moseley



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Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek