University of California, Irvine | 2015 Sep 08
Hubble Space Telescope data, new statistical method instrumental to research project
[c][attachment=0]press_fig1_edit3[1].jpg[/attachment][/c][hr][/hr]Astronomers from the University of California, Irvine and Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute have generated the most accurate statistical description yet of faint, early galaxies as they existed in the universe 500 million years after the Big Bang.
In a research paper published today in Nature Communications, the team describes its use of a new statistical method to analyze Hubble Space Telescope data captured during lengthy sky surveys. The method enabled the scientists to parse out signals from the noise in Hubble’s deep-sky images, providing the first estimate of the number of small, primordial galaxies in the early universe. The researchers concluded that there are close to 10 times more of these galaxies than were previously detected in deep Hubble surveys.
UCI Ph.D. student Ketron Mitchell-Wynne, lead author on the paper, said the time period under investigation is known as the “epoch of reionization.” Coming after the Big Bang and a few hundred million years in which a dark universe was dominated by photon-absorbing neutral hydrogen, the epoch of reionization was characterized by a phase transition of hydrogen gas due to the accelerated process of star and galaxy formation. ...
Ultraviolet luminosity density of the universe during the epoch of reionization - Ketron Mitchell-Wynne et al
- Nature Communications 6 7945 (08 Sep 2015) DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8945