Is it possible to observe the light from the first star ever formed?

Question

Millions of years before the 1st star was born, there were no stars at all! Scientists say a telescope 100 million times more powerful than the Hubble is being built. What if we could observe the explosion of the Big Bang?

Answer 1

We can already detect the light from the Big Bang - the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation has been measured with stunning accuracy. The "first star(s)" theory is known as a "bottom up" theory. The flip side of that is the "top down" theory, where galactic clouds formed and then stars formed inside of them. I lean towards the top down theory because we can detect quasars at about 12 billion LY out -- near the beginning of time. Quasars are quasi-stellar galactic-size objects that are suspected of having supermassive black holes at their centers and emitting collosal energy. There's nothing like them in "modern" space - apparently they evolved into galaxies like our own. But to try to answer your question, I think it is possible to push the envelope beyond 12 billion LY that the Hubble is capable of seeing. At a certain distance, though, things will be receding from us at faster than lightspeed (the expansion of space is not bound by the cosmic speed limit of light), and therefore we wouldn't be able to see them, not until their light has had time to reach our telescopes. In another billion years, we may be able to detect stuff 15 billion LY away.

Answer 2

We already can observe the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. They call it the Cosmic Background Radiation, and they've mapped it in incredible detail. The first star is actually harder to see, since it's very small, while the CBR covers the whole sky. Plus, we don't know where the first star formed. We can look back and see stars as the first ones were forming billions of years ago, but for all we know the first star was a lot closer, and the light of it's death reached us long ago.

Answer 3

No.

And what you "heard" is totally bogus. We are building (and have built) many telescopes that are more powerful than Hubble, but not 100 million times more...that is astronomically ridiculous for anyone to make that claim.

The Hubble is a relatively small telescope, as research telescopes go. Its mirror is 2.5 meters in diameter. There are dozens of ground-based telescopes that are more powerful than hubble. Putting a telescope in space does have advantages, in that there are many wavelengths of light (such as far-infrared) that are absorbed by the atmosphere. The issue of clarity (not having to look through the atmosphere), is not as much an issue anymore, since adaptive optics technology is allwoing ground-based telescopes to see just as clearly (in fact with even better resolution) than Hubble. Space telescopes are also enormously expensive, difficult to maintain, and have much shorter lifetimes that ground-based telescopes.

That said, the James Webb Space Telescope (google it) is the next generation of space telescope, to be launched next decade. It will have a 6.5 meter mirror and be parked in space on the opposite side of the moon in one of the Lagrange points.

Answer 4

Yes and no. Why?.......because whilst the first star to be formed did actually exist at some stage in the very early Universe, it was most likely just one of quite a few that formed at around about the same time. Stars very rarely form as single objects......they're usually born in loose clusters of stars and/or as members of binary and mulitple systems (especially for the larger stars).

However it is theorised that the first stars, called Population III stars, formed around 100-250 million years after the Big Bang. They ended the period known as the Great Dark Age, which began itself after the Universe became transparent to radiation some 300,000 years after the Bang. When the Universe initially became transparent, all the energy emitted as light and radiation from the Bang spread out so thinly and evenly in all directions that the Universe became nothing more than a dark space filled with hydrogen and helium gas (for the most part).

When these stars formed, they formed from very large clumps of gas....some upto 1000-2000 solar masses, hence the stars were gigantic compared to stars of today. This happened because the composition of those first clumps was pretty much just hydrogen and helium, which can sustain collapse into a star of very large mass before it breaks up. Unlike clumps of gas today which are "contaminated" by other elements such as oxygen and carbon etc. These break up earlier on because those extra elements create temp and pressure instabilities in the clumps.

Anyway, when these first stars fired up, they generated enormous amounts of radiation which re-ionised the gases surrounding them and drove large bubbles relatively free of gas into the interstellar environment. The shock waves of those bubbles formed more stars like their bretheren. However, when those huge first stars reached the ends of their lives, after only 1-10 million years and exploded as hypernovae (mega sized supernovae) they scattered the byproducts of their nuclear processes from their cores, leaving no remnants behind. But because those first stars were mostly hydrogen and helium, their cores couldn't fuse elements much past oxygen, so when they got to this stage of nuclear burning, they then went "pop" :):)

Scientist think they may have found evidence for these stars in looking at the CBR (Cosmic Background Radiation), in that they've found an overlying pattern of clump inhomogenities that are indicative of concentrations of matter which are hotter than the average and appear to be point source like. Which would be most likely stars. But, with newer space based telescopes about to be launched soon.....including Hubble's replacement, they should be able to see the stars individually.

Answer 5

You can not observed something that has already happened! you can only observed its effect!. What the Hubble telescope can see are distant ripples or fluctuations of the cosmic radiation 15 billions years ago at the time of the big bang!

Answer 6

Well, the problem is, we dont' really know which star would be the original star. The fact is, a whole lot of stars were formed at the same time, and the light has probably long passed our viewing time. Also, that particular star is probably long gone by now!

Answer 7

because of the fact the Bible components information that is examined and skilled. Extraterrestrial life is an insignificant concept and the severe mind's eye of human beings, various which evaluate that existence is a consequence of mathematical possibilities. existence does no longer originate from math or possibilities. only as human existence and another sentient life on the earth comes from planned acts of earlier existence, so does any existence that exists in the universe.

Answer 8

There were probably more than one formed simultaneously at the beginning......all over the universe at once, with critical mass formed at the same moment at several different places. So, there was not just one, but more than one "first".