Click on the image for movie of
Stars Spring up Out of the Darkness
This artist's animation illustrates the universe's early years, from its
explosive formation to its dark ages to its first stars and mini-galaxies.
Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found patches of infrared
light splattered across the sky that might be the collective glow of
clumps of the universe's first objects. Astronomers do not know if these
first objects were stars or "quasars," which are black holes voraciously
consuming surrounding gas.
The movie begins with a flash of color that represents the birth of the
universe, an explosion called the Big Bang that occurred about 13.7
billion years ago. A period of darkness ensues, where gas begins to clump
together.
The universe's first stars are then shown springing up out of the gas
clumps, flooding the universe with light, an event that probably happened
about a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Though these first
stars formed out of gas alone, their deaths seeded the universe with the
dusty heavy chemical elements that helped create future generations of
stars.
The first stars, called Population III stars (our star is a Population I
star), were much bigger and brighter than any in our nearby universe, with
masses about 1,000 times that of our sun. They grouped together into
mini-galaxies, which then merged to form galaxies like our own mature
Milky Way galaxy.
The first quasars, not shown here, ultimately became the centers of
powerful galaxies that are more common in the distant universe.
