Distant galaxies reveal the clearing of the cosmic fog; New VLT observations chart timeline of reionization

ScienceDaily (Oct. 13, 2011) — An international team of astronomers used the VLT as a time machine, to look back into the early Universe and observe several of the most distant galaxies ever detected. They have been able to measure their distances accurately and find that we are seeing them as they were between 780 million and a billion years after the Big Bang [1].

The new observations have allowed astronomers to establish a timeline for what is known as the age of reionisation [2] for the first time. During this phase the fog of hydrogen gas in the early Universe was clearing, allowing ultraviolet light to pass unhindered for the first time.

The new results, which will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, build on a long and systematic search for distant galaxies that the team has carried out with the VLT over the last three years.

"Archaeologists can reconstruct a timeline of the past from the artifacts they find in different layers of soil. Astronomers can go one better: we can look directly into the remote past and observe the faint light from different galaxies at different stages in cosmic evolution," explains Adriano Fontana, of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory who led this project. "The differences between the galaxies tell us about the changing conditions in the Universe over this important period, and how quickly these changes were occurring."

Different chemical elements glow brightly at characteristic colours. These spikes in brightness are known as emission lines. One of the strongest ultraviolet emission lines is the Lyman-alpha line, which comes from hydrogen gas [3]. It is bright and recognisable enough to be seen even in observations of very faint and faraway galaxies.

Spotting the Lyman-alpha line for five very distant galaxies [4] allowed the team to do two key things: first, by observing how far the line had been shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, they were able to determine the galaxies' distances, and hence how soon after the Big Bang they could see them [5]. This let them place them in order, creating a timeline which shows how the galaxies' light evolved over time. Secondly, they were able to see the extent to which the Lyman-alpha emission -- which comes from glowing hydrogen within the galaxies -- was reabsorbed by the neutral hydrogen fog in intergalactic space at different points in time.

"We see a dramatic difference in the amount of ultraviolet light that was blocked between the earliest and latest galaxies in our sample," says lead author Laura Pentericci of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory. "When the Universe was only 780 million years old this neutral hydrogen was quite abundant, filling from 10 to 50% of the Universe' volume. But only 200 million years later the amount of neutral hydrogen had dropped to a very low level, similar to what we see today. It seems that reionisation must have happened quicker than astronomers previously thought."

As well as probing the rate at which the primordial fog cleared, the team's observations also hint at the likely source of the ultraviolet light which provided the energy necessary for reionisation to occur. There are several competing theories for where this light came from -- two leading candidates are the Universe's first generation of stars [6], and the intense radiation emitted by matter as it falls towards black holes.

"The detailed analysis of the faint light from two of the most distant galaxies we found suggests that the very first generation of stars may have contributed to the energy output observed," says Eros Vanzella of the INAF Trieste Observatory, a member of the research team. "These would have been very young and massive stars, about five thousand times younger and one hundred times more massive than the Sun, and they may have been able to dissolve the primordial fog and make it transparent."

The highly accurate measurements required to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, and show that the stars can produce the required energy, require observations from space, or from ESO's planned European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the world's largest eye on the sky once completed early next decade.

Studying this early period in cosmic history is technically challenging because accurate observations of extremely distant and faint galaxies are needed, a task which can only be attempted with the most powerful telescopes. For this study, the team used the great light-gathering power of the 8.2-metre VLT to carry out spectroscopic observations, targetting galaxies first identified by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and in deep images from the VLT.

Notes

[1] The most distant galaxy that has been reported with a distance measured by spectroscopy is at a redshift of 8.6, placing it 600 million years after the Big Bang (eso1041). There is a candidate galaxy thought to be at a redshift of about 10 (480 million years after the Big Bang) identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, but this is awaiting confirmation. The most distant galaxy in this study is at a redshift of 7.1, placing it 780 million years after the Big Bang. The Universe today is 13.7 billion years old. The new sample of five confirmed galaxies with Lyman-alpha detections (out of 20 candidates) includes half of all galaxies known at z>7.

[2] At the time the first stars and galaxies formed, the Universe was filled with electrically neutral hydrogen gas, which absorbs ultraviolet light. As the ultraviolet radiation from these early galaxies excited the gas, making it electrically charged (ionised), it gradually became transparent to ultraviolet light. This process is technically known as reionisation, as there is thought to have been a brief period within the first 100 000 years after the Big Bang in which the hydrogen was also ionised.

[3] The team measured the effects of the hydrogen fog using spectroscopy, a technique which involves splitting and spreading out the light from the galaxy into its component colours, much like a prism splits sunlight into a rainbow.

[4] The team used the VLT to study the spectra of 20 candidate galaxies at redshifts close to 7. These come from deep imaging studies of three separate fields. Of these 20 targets five were found to have clearly detected Lyman-alpha emission. This is currently the only set of spectroscopically confirmed galaxies around z=7.

[5] Because the Universe is expanding, the wavelength of light from objects gets stretched as it passes through space. The further light has to travel, the more its wavelength is stretched. As red is the longest wavelength visible to our eyes, the characteristic red colour this gives to extremely distant objects has become known as 'redshift'. Although it is technically a measure of how the colour of an object's light has been affected, it is also by extension a measure both of the object's distance, and of how long after the Big Bang we see it.

[6] Astronomers classify stars into three categories, known as Population I, Population II and Population III. Population I stars, like our Sun, are rich in heavier elements synthesised in the hearts of older stars and in supernova explosions: as they are made up from the wreckage of previous generations of stars, they only came into existence later in the Universe. Population II stars have fewer heavy elements in them and are predominantly made up of the hydrogen, helium and lithium created during the Big Bang. These are older stars, though there are still many of them in existence in the Universe today. Population III stars have never been directly observed, though they are thought to have existed in the early years of the Universe. As these contained only the material created during the Big Bang, they contained no heavier elements at all. Because of the role of heavier elements in the formation of stars, only very large stars with very short lifespans were able to form at this stage, and so all the Population III stars quickly ended their lives in supernovae in the early years of the Universe. Up to now, no solid evidence of Population III stars has been confirmed even in observations of very distant galaxies.

More information

This research was presented in a paper "Spectroscopic Confirmation of z7 LBGs: Probing the Earliest Galaxies and the Epoch of Reionization," to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

The team is composed of L.Pentericci (INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Rome, Italy [INAF-OAR]), A. Fontana (INAF-OAR), E. Vanzella (INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Trieste, Italy [INAF-OAT]), M. Castellano (INAF-OAR), A. Grazian (INAF-OAR), M. Dijkstra (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik, Garching, Germany), K. Boutsia (INAF-OAR), S. Cristiani (INAF-OAT), M. Dickinson (National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, USA), E. Giallongo (INAF-OAR), M. Giavalisco (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA), R. Maiolino (INAF-OAR), A. Moorwood (ESO, Garching), P. Santini (INAF-OAR).

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Distant galaxies reveal the clearing of the cosmic fog; New VLT observations chart timeline of reionization

ScienceDaily (Oct. 13, 2011) — An international team of astronomers used the VLT as a time machine, to look back into the early Universe and observe several of the most distant galaxies ever detected. They have been able to measure their distances accurately and find that we are seeing them as they were between 780 million and a billion years after the Big Bang [1].

The new observations have allowed astronomers to establish a timeline for what is known as the age of reionisation [2] for the first time. During this phase the fog of hydrogen gas in the early Universe was clearing, allowing ultraviolet light to pass unhindered for the first time.

The new results, which will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, build on a long and systematic search for distant galaxies that the team has carried out with the VLT over the last three years.

"Archaeologists can reconstruct a timeline of the past from the artifacts they find in different layers of soil. Astronomers can go one better: we can look directly into the remote past and observe the faint light from different galaxies at different stages in cosmic evolution," explains Adriano Fontana, of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory who led this project. "The differences between the galaxies tell us about the changing conditions in the Universe over this important period, and how quickly these changes were occurring."

Different chemical elements glow brightly at characteristic colours. These spikes in brightness are known as emission lines. One of the strongest ultraviolet emission lines is the Lyman-alpha line, which comes from hydrogen gas [3]. It is bright and recognisable enough to be seen even in observations of very faint and faraway galaxies.

Spotting the Lyman-alpha line for five very distant galaxies [4] allowed the team to do two key things: first, by observing how far the line had been shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, they were able to determine the galaxies' distances, and hence how soon after the Big Bang they could see them [5]. This let them place them in order, creating a timeline which shows how the galaxies' light evolved over time. Secondly, they were able to see the extent to which the Lyman-alpha emission -- which comes from glowing hydrogen within the galaxies -- was reabsorbed by the neutral hydrogen fog in intergalactic space at different points in time.

"We see a dramatic difference in the amount of ultraviolet light that was blocked between the earliest and latest galaxies in our sample," says lead author Laura Pentericci of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory. "When the Universe was only 780 million years old this neutral hydrogen was quite abundant, filling from 10 to 50% of the Universe' volume. But only 200 million years later the amount of neutral hydrogen had dropped to a very low level, similar to what we see today. It seems that reionisation must have happened quicker than astronomers previously thought."

As well as probing the rate at which the primordial fog cleared, the team's observations also hint at the likely source of the ultraviolet light which provided the energy necessary for reionisation to occur. There are several competing theories for where this light came from -- two leading candidates are the Universe's first generation of stars [6], and the intense radiation emitted by matter as it falls towards black holes.

"The detailed analysis of the faint light from two of the most distant galaxies we found suggests that the very first generation of stars may have contributed to the energy output observed," says Eros Vanzella of the INAF Trieste Observatory, a member of the research team. "These would have been very young and massive stars, about five thousand times younger and one hundred times more massive than the Sun, and they may have been able to dissolve the primordial fog and make it transparent."

The highly accurate measurements required to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, and show that the stars can produce the required energy, require observations from space, or from ESO's planned European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the world's largest eye on the sky once completed early next decade.

Studying this early period in cosmic history is technically challenging because accurate observations of extremely distant and faint galaxies are needed, a task which can only be attempted with the most powerful telescopes. For this study, the team used the great light-gathering power of the 8.2-metre VLT to carry out spectroscopic observations, targetting galaxies first identified by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and in deep images from the VLT.

Notes

[1] The most distant galaxy that has been reported with a distance measured by spectroscopy is at a redshift of 8.6, placing it 600 million years after the Big Bang (eso1041). There is a candidate galaxy thought to be at a redshift of about 10 (480 million years after the Big Bang) identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, but this is awaiting confirmation. The most distant galaxy in this study is at a redshift of 7.1, placing it 780 million years after the Big Bang. The Universe today is 13.7 billion years old. The new sample of five confirmed galaxies with Lyman-alpha detections (out of 20 candidates) includes half of all galaxies known at z>7.

[2] At the time the first stars and galaxies formed, the Universe was filled with electrically neutral hydrogen gas, which absorbs ultraviolet light. As the ultraviolet radiation from these early galaxies excited the gas, making it electrically charged (ionised), it gradually became transparent to ultraviolet light. This process is technically known as reionisation, as there is thought to have been a brief period within the first 100 000 years after the Big Bang in which the hydrogen was also ionised.

[3] The team measured the effects of the hydrogen fog using spectroscopy, a technique which involves splitting and spreading out the light from the galaxy into its component colours, much like a prism splits sunlight into a rainbow.

[4] The team used the VLT to study the spectra of 20 candidate galaxies at redshifts close to 7. These come from deep imaging studies of three separate fields. Of these 20 targets five were found to have clearly detected Lyman-alpha emission. This is currently the only set of spectroscopically confirmed galaxies around z=7.

[5] Because the Universe is expanding, the wavelength of light from objects gets stretched as it passes through space. The further light has to travel, the more its wavelength is stretched. As red is the longest wavelength visible to our eyes, the characteristic red colour this gives to extremely distant objects has become known as 'redshift'. Although it is technically a measure of how the colour of an object's light has been affected, it is also by extension a measure both of the object's distance, and of how long after the Big Bang we see it.

[6] Astronomers classify stars into three categories, known as Population I, Population II and Population III. Population I stars, like our Sun, are rich in heavier elements synthesised in the hearts of older stars and in supernova explosions: as they are made up from the wreckage of previous generations of stars, they only came into existence later in the Universe. Population II stars have fewer heavy elements in them and are predominantly made up of the hydrogen, helium and lithium created during the Big Bang. These are older stars, though there are still many of them in existence in the Universe today. Population III stars have never been directly observed, though they are thought to have existed in the early years of the Universe. As these contained only the material created during the Big Bang, they contained no heavier elements at all. Because of the role of heavier elements in the formation of stars, only very large stars with very short lifespans were able to form at this stage, and so all the Population III stars quickly ended their lives in supernovae in the early years of the Universe. Up to now, no solid evidence of Population III stars has been confirmed even in observations of very distant galaxies.

More information

This research was presented in a paper "Spectroscopic Confirmation of z7 LBGs: Probing the Earliest Galaxies and the Epoch of Reionization," to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

The team is composed of L.Pentericci (INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Rome, Italy [INAF-OAR]), A. Fontana (INAF-OAR), E. Vanzella (INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Trieste, Italy [INAF-OAT]), M. Castellano (INAF-OAR), A. Grazian (INAF-OAR), M. Dijkstra (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik, Garching, Germany), K. Boutsia (INAF-OAR), S. Cristiani (INAF-OAT), M. Dickinson (National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, USA), E. Giallongo (INAF-OAR), M. Giavalisco (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA), R. Maiolino (INAF-OAR), A. Moorwood (ESO, Garching), P. Santini (INAF-OAR).

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Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

NASA's Spitzer finds distant galaxies grazed on gas

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2011) — Galaxies once thought of as voracious tigers are more like grazing cows, according to a new study using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Astronomers have discovered that galaxies in the distant, early universe continuously ingested their star-making fuel over long periods of time. This goes against previous theories that the galaxies devoured their fuel in quick bursts after run-ins with other galaxies.

"Our study shows the merging of massive galaxies was not the dominant method of galaxy growth in the distant universe," said Ranga-Ram Chary of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "We're finding this type of galactic cannibalism was rare. Instead, we are seeing evidence for a mechanism of galaxy growth in which a typical galaxy fed itself through a steady stream of gas, making stars at a much faster rate than previously thought."

Chary is the principal investigator of the research, appearing in the Aug. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. According to his findings, these grazing galaxies fed steadily over periods of hundreds of millions of years and created an unusual amount of plump stars, up to 100 times the mass of our sun.

"This is the first time that we have identified galaxies that supersized themselves by grazing," said Hyunjin Shim, also of the Spitzer Science Center and lead author of the paper. "They have many more massive stars than our Milky Way galaxy."

Galaxies like our Milky Way are giant collections of stars, gas and dust. They grow in size by feeding off gas and converting it to new stars. A long-standing question in astronomy is: Where did distant galaxies that formed billions of years ago acquire this stellar fuel? The most favored theory was that galaxies grew by merging with other galaxies, feeding off gas stirred up in the collisions.

Chary and his team addressed this question by using Spitzer to survey more than 70 remote galaxies that existed 1 to 2 billion years after the Big Bang (our universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old). To their surprise, these galaxies were blazing with what is called H alpha, which is radiation from hydrogen gas that has been hit with ultraviolet light from stars. High levels of H alpha indicate stars are forming vigorously. Seventy percent of the surveyed galaxies show strong signs of H alpha. By contrast, only 0.1 percent of galaxies in our local universe possess this signature.

Previous studies using ultraviolet-light telescopes found about six times less star formation than Spitzer, which sees infrared light. Scientists think this may be due to large amounts of obscuring dust, through which infrared light can sneak. Spitzer opened a new window onto the galaxies by taking very long-exposure infrared images of a patch of sky called the GOODS fields, for Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey.

Further analyses showed that these galaxies furiously formed stars up to 100 times faster than the current star-formation rate of our Milky Way. What's more, the star formation took place over a long period of time, hundreds of millions of years. This tells astronomers that the galaxies did not grow due to mergers, or collisions, which happen on shorter timescales. While such smash-ups are common in the universe -- for example, our Milky Way will merge with the Andromeda galaxy in about 5 billion years -- the new study shows that large mergers were not the main cause of galaxy growth. Instead, the results show that distant, giant galaxies bulked up by feeding off a steady supply of gas that probably streamed in from filaments of dark matter.

Chary said, "If you could visit a planet in one of these galaxies, the sky would be a crazy place, with tons of bright stars, and fairly frequent supernova explosions."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer and http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ .

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Measuring the distant universe in 3-D using light from 14,000 quasars

ScienceDaily (May 2, 2011) — The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, using light from 14,000 quasars -- supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies billions of light years away -- has been constructed by scientists with the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III).

The map is the first major result from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), SDSS-III's largest survey, whose principal investigator is David Schlegel of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The huge new map was presented at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Anaheim, CA, by Anže Slosar of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

BOSS is the first attempt to use baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) as a precision tool to measure dark energy. Baryon oscillation refers to how matter clumps in a regular way throughout the universe, a physical manifestation of the expansion of the universe. Until now, 3-D maps showing this oscillation have been based on the distribution of visible galaxies. BOSS is the first survey to map intergalactic hydrogen gas as well, using distant quasars whose light is produced by supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies.

"Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, which we use as convenient backlights to illuminate the intervening hydrogen gas that fills the universe between us and them," Slosar says. "We can see their shadows, and the details in their shadows" -- specifically, the absorption features in their spectra known as the Lyman-alpha forest -- "allowing us to see how the gas is clumped along our line of sight. The amazing thing is that this allows us to see the universe so very far away, where measuring positions of individual galaxies in large numbers is impractical."

"BOSS is the first attempt to use the Lyman-alpha forest to measure dark energy," says principal investigator Schlegel. "Because the Sloan Telescope has such a wide field of view, and because these quasars are so faint, there was no one who wasn't nervous about whether we could really bring it off."

By using 14,000 of the quasars collected by the Sloan Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico during the first year of BOSS's planned five-year run, the new map demonstrates that indeed it is possible to determine variations in the density of intergalactic hydrogen gas at cosmological distances and thus to measure the effects of dark energy at those distances.

Slosar, who leads BOSS's Lyman-alpha cosmology working group, says that while similar measurements have been made with individual quasars or small groups of quasars in the past, "These have given only one-dimensional information about fluctuations in density along the line of sight. Before now there has never been enough density of quasars for a 3-D view."

The distance scale of the new map corresponds to an early time in the history of the universe, when the distribution of matter was nearly uniform. Any effects of dark energy detected so early would settle basic questions about its nature.

Measuring the expansion history of the universe

Baryon acoustic oscillation is cosmologists' shorthand for the periodic clustering (oscillation) of matter (baryons), which originated as pressure (acoustic) waves moving through the hot, opaque, liquid-like early universe. The pressure differences resulted in differences in density and left their signature as small variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background. Later -- because the denser regions formed by the pressure waves seeded galaxy formation and the accumulation of other matter -- the original acoustic waves were echoed in the net-like filaments and voids of the clustering of galaxies and in variations in the density of intergalactic hydrogen gas.

The oscillations repeat at about 500-million-light-year intervals, and because this scale is firmly anchored in the cosmic microwave background it provides a ruler -- a very big one -- to measure the history of the expanding universe. With this cosmic yardstick it will be possible to determine just how fast the universe was expanding at the redshift of the objects in the BOSS survey -- in other words, how the expansion rate has changed over time. (Redshift is the degree to which the light from an object speeding away from the viewer is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.) Knowing whether expansion has accelerated at a constant rate or has varied over time will help decide among the major theories of dark energy.

Over its five-year extent, BOSS is using two distinct methods to calibrate the markings on the cosmic yardstick. The first method, well tested, will precisely measure 1.5 million luminous red galaxies at "low" redshifts around z = 0.7 (z stands for redshift). The second method will eventually measure the Lyman-alpha forest of 160,000 quasars with high redshifts around z = 2.5. These redshifts correspond to galaxies at distances of 2 to 6 billion light years and quasars at 10 to 11 billion light years.

Lyman-alpha is the name given to a line in the spectrum of hydrogen, marking the wavelength of light emitted when an excited hydrogen electron falls back to its ground state; it's a strong signal in the light from quasars. As the quasar's light passes through intervening clouds of hydrogen gas, additional lines accumulate where the gas clouds absorb the signal, echoing it but shifting by different degrees according to factors including the redshift of the gas cloud and its density. The spectrum of a distant quasar may have hundreds of lines, clumped and blended into a messy, wiggly structure in the spectrum: this is what astronomers call the Lyman-alpha forest.

"In theory, you can turn any of these absorption lines directly into redshifts and locate the gas cloud precisely," says Bill Carithers of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, who concentrates on extracting relevant information from the noisy data that comes straight from the telescope. "But in practice only the spectra of the very brightest quasars are clean enough to make things that simple."

Carithers says that "while a very long exposure could improve the signal-to-noise ratio, that comes at a price. We need lots and lots of quasars to make a map. We can only afford to spend so much telescope time on each."

Since the heart of BAO is the correlation distance among density oscillations, the trick turns out to be not overconcentrating on individual spectra but instead measuring the correlations among them. "For any correlation distance, many quasars will contribute," says Carithers, "so the noise will average and the signal will get stronger. We can say, 'I'll use my data, noise and all.'"

If the attempt to measure density variations in the intergalactic gas is indeed successful, what will the BAO correlation signal from the Lyman-alpha forest look like? Shirley Ho of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, working with Slosar and Berkeley Lab's Martin White, developed simulations to find out.

""We modeled what you would see when you have a BOSS-like data set, and through the simulations we understand the possible sources of systematics when we try with real data to detect the acoustic peak from the Lyman-alpha forest, the signature of baryon acoustic oscillations," Ho says. Comparing the real data to the simulation confirms whether the search is working as hoped.

With Peter Nugent, who heads the Computational Cosmology Center at Berkeley Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Ho established a 30-terabyte BOSS Project Directory to store the Lyman-alpha simulations, plus the entire Lyman-alpha raw data set as it arrives. The directory also contains a subset of galaxy data and is available to all BOSS collaborators and to the public. The total BOSS data set is stored in a dedicated cluster of computers nicknamed Riemann.

Targeting the search

The wide-field Sloan Telescope covers a wide expanse of sky at moderate magnification. To measure both galaxies and quasars, a thousand targets for each BOSS exposure are selected in advance from existing surveys. At the telescope's focal plane, "plug plates" are precision-machine-drilled with tiny holes at positions of known galaxies and quasars. These holes are plugged with optical fibers that channel the light from each chosen galaxy or quasar to a spectrograph, which isolates the spectrum of each individual object. Schlegel credits Berkeley Lab's Nicholas Ross for doing much of the "incredibly hard work" involved in this targeting.

Slosar says, "Our exploratory paper includes less than a tenth of the 160,000 quasars that BOSS will study, but already that's enough to establish a proof of the concept. This is a potentially revolutionary technique for mapping the very distant universe. We're paving the way for future BAO experiments like BigBOSS to follow suit." BigBOSS is a proposed survey that will find precise locations for 20 million galaxies and quasars and go beyond BOSS to encompass 10 times the volume of the finished BOSS map.

"By the time BOSS ends, we will be able to measure how fast the universe was expanding 11 billion years ago with an accuracy of a couple of percent," says Patrick McDonald of Berkeley Lab and Brookhaven, who pioneered techniques for measuring the universe with the Lyman-alpha forest. "Considering that no one has ever measured the cosmic expansion rate so far back in time, that's a pretty astonishing prospect."

Says Slosar, "We now know we can use the Lyman-alpha forest to look at the dark energy. There is all this structure at the distant universe that has never been seen before. Sometimes I feel like an adventuring cartographer from the Middle Ages!"

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

Anže Slosar, Andreu Font-Ribera, Matthew M. Pieri, James Rich, Jean-Marc Le Goff, Éric Aubourg, Jon Brinkmann, Nicolas Busca, Bill Carithers, Romain Charlassier, Marina Cortês, Rupert Croft, Kyle S. Dawson, Daniel Eisenstein, Jean-Christophe Hamilton, Shirley Ho, Khee-Gan Lee, Robert Lupton, Patrick McDonald, Bumbarija Medolin, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Adam D. Myers, Robert C. Nichol, Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, Isabelle Pâris, Patrick Petitjean, Yodovina Piškur, Emmanuel Rollinde, Nicholas P. Ross, David J. Schlegel, Donald P. Schneider, Erin Sheldon, Benjamin A. Weaver, David H. Weinberg, Christophe Yeche, Donald G. York. The Lyman-a forest in three dimensions: measurements of large scale flux correlations from BOSS 1st-year data. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2011; (submitted) [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

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