A 13-Billion Snap Shot

TO A casual observer it could be the psychedelic creation of a mischievous puppy that has dipped its paws in paint. But it may be one of the most extraordinary pictures ever snapped.

It is, scientists said yesterday, the glow from the first things to form in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. Snapped by NASA's Spitzer space telescope, the bizarre objects must have existed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. An Australian astrophysicist, Ray Norris, said the NASA team may have found "the holy grail" of astronomy.

What the ancient objects are remains a mystery. One possibility is stars, the first to light up after the dawn of time. They would have been "humungous", said NASA, "more than 1000 times the mass of our sun". Or they may be "voracious black holes". While black holes are invisible, heat emitted by matter plunging into them can be detected. "Whatever these objects are," said Alexander Kashlinsky, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, "they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today." The image was made by Spitzer shooting pictures of five areas of the sky. All light from stars and galaxies in the foreground was then removed, leaving only the ancient infrared glow.

"Imagine trying to see fireworks at night from across a crowded city," Dr Kashlinsky said. "If you could turn off the city lights, you might get a glimpse at the fireworks. We have shut down the lights of the universe to see the outlines of its first fireworks." Professor Norris, from the CSIRO's Australia Telescope, said the image did not show the objects themselves, but their glow that was radiating from all parts of the sky, because "the early universe is all around us".

The next step would be to find and get direct images of the objects. "Many of us are searching for these objects," Professor Norris said. He believed locating them would be possible with the James Webb space telescope, the Hubble's successor, to be launched in the next decade, and the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope that may be built in Australia. Professor Norris conceded astronomers could not explain how such big objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. "According to our models, it takes quite a while to build black holes and galaxies," he said.