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The researchers created a new astronomical instrument that successfully helped estimate the abundance of metals in the early universe.
The WINERED instrument allows for better observations of astronomical bodies such as quasars in the early universe, billions of years ago. The researchers hope that this deeper level of exploration will help answer questions about the origin not only of metals in the universe but also of the stars themselves.
Iron is one of the most important elements for life as we know it and for the primitive and modern technology that has shaped human history. But details about the exact origin of iron and other important metals like magnesium remain elusive. The exploration of this is important in the field of astronomy as it is also linked to the origins of the first stars that would have started to shine several hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Project associate researcher Hiroaki Sameshima of the Tokyo University Institute of Astronomy and his team decided that a new tool was needed to study these topics. Due to limited instrumentation, previous observations to gather data for the study of the origins of metals have mainly examined old nearby stars. But this only provided astronomers with information about our unique galaxy. A new instrument with increased sensitivity to near-infrared light could push boundaries and open observations of distant quasars, fiercely energetic ancient galactic nuclei that emitted light when the universe was only 2.4 billion years old.
“By mounting the WINERED instrument on a large telescope, we can see further back in time as we can observe bodies that are more distant, or older, than those of previous studies. We can now see the details of quasars that are over 10 billion years old,” he said. Sameshima. “WINERED is a special type of spectrograph, capable of reading chemical signatures in the light of distant bodies. It revealed the iron and magnesium footprints in the light of these quasars, and this allowed us to calculate the abundance of these. elements when the universe was much younger than previous studies allowed. “
Now that researchers have established a new method to directly examine the abundance of metals in the early universe, the challenge becomes to refine the technique and broaden its scope to collect more data. With improved data, astronomers can build on this study and create theories to explain the origins of metals, including iron in the blood.
newspaper article
Hiroaki Sameshima, Yuzuru Yoshii, Noriyuki Matsunaga, Naoto Kobayashi, Yuji Ikeda, Sohei Kondo, Satoshi Hamano, Misaki Mizumoto, Akira Arai, Chikako Yasui, Kei Fukue, Hideyo Kawakita, Shogo Otsubo, Giuseppe Bono and Ivoiane II Mizumoto. Luminous quasar fluxes az ~ 2.7 and Baldwin effect evaluation in the flux-abundance conversion method for quasars The Astrophysical Journal.
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