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CU-Boulder instrument onboard Hubble reveals the universe is ‘missing’ light
CU-Boulder instrument onboard Hubble reveals the universe is ‘missing’ light
Something is amiss in the universe. There appears to be an enormous deficit of ultraviolet light in the cosmic budget.
Observations made by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a $70 million instrument designed by the University of Colorado Boulder and installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, have revealed that the universe is “missing” a large amount of light.
“It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs,” said the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Juna Kollmeier, lead author of a new study on the missing light published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Where is all that light coming from? It’s missing from our census.”
The research team—which includes Benjamin Oppenheimer and Charles Danforth of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy—analyzed the tendrils of hydrogen that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies. When hydrogen atoms are struck by highly energetic ultraviolet light, they are transformed from electrically neutral atoms to charged ions. The astronomers were surprised when they found far more hydrogen ions than could be explained with the known ultraviolet light in the universe, which comes primarily from quasars. The difference is a stunning 400 percent.
See more at: http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/07/09/cu-boulder-instrument-onboard-hubble-reveals-universe-%E2%80%98missing%E2%80%99-light
Something is amiss in the universe. There appears to be an enormous deficit of ultraviolet light in the cosmic budget.
Observations made by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a $70 million instrument designed by the University of Colorado Boulder and installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, have revealed that the universe is “missing” a large amount of light.
“It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs,” said the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Juna Kollmeier, lead author of a new study on the missing light published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Where is all that light coming from? It’s missing from our census.”
The research team—which includes Benjamin Oppenheimer and Charles Danforth of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy—analyzed the tendrils of hydrogen that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies. When hydrogen atoms are struck by highly energetic ultraviolet light, they are transformed from electrically neutral atoms to charged ions. The astronomers were surprised when they found far more hydrogen ions than could be explained with the known ultraviolet light in the universe, which comes primarily from quasars. The difference is a stunning 400 percent.
See more at: http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/07/09/cu-boulder-instrument-onboard-hubble-reveals-universe-%E2%80%98missing%E2%80%99-light
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