Tracing the first stars with cosmic infrared background fluctuations
Tracing the first stars with cosmic infrared background fluctuations
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利用宇宙红外背景波动追踪第一批恒星
DOI：
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发表时间：
2005
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
S. Moseley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
A. Kashlinsky;R. Arendt;J. Mather;S. Moseley
最深处的太空和地面观测发现，在宇宙还很古老的时候，富含金属的星系就存在于宇宙时期。在这些恒星族之前必须有第一批不含金属的恒星，即第三星族。最近的宇宙微波背景偏振测量表明，恒星在宇宙年龄为 Myr时就开始形成了。从理论上讲，现在认为第三星族的恒星比现在富含金属的恒星群要大得多。虽然现有的或计划中的望远镜无法单独探测到这些源，但它们会产生近红外的重要宇宙红外背景辐射，其波动反映了原始密度场的情况。在这里，我们报告了去除前景恒星和星系后漫射通量波动的测量。这些各向异性超过了仪器噪声和更局部的前景，可以归因于大质量星族III恒星的发射，提供了由这些天体主导的时代的观测证据。
The deepest space and ground-based observations find metal-enriched galaxies at cosmic times when the Universe was Gyr old. These stellar populations had to be preceded by the metal-free first stars, Population III. Recent cosmic microwave background polarization measurements indicate that stars started forming early when the Universe was Myr old. Theoretically it is now thought that Population III stars were significantly more massive than the present metal-rich stellar populations. While such sources will not be individually detectable by existing or planned telescopes, they would have produced significant cosmic infrared background radiation in the near-infrared, whose fluctuations reflect the conditions in the primordial density field. Here we report a measurement of diffuse flux fluctuations after removing foreground stars and galaxies. The anisotropies exceed the instrument noise and the more local foregrounds and can be attributed to emission from massive Population III stars, providing observational evidence of an era dominated by these objects.