TEAM HERALD
MAYEM: An international team of astronomers led by Goan Astronomer, Dr Vithal Tilvi, has found evidence that the entire universe was permeated with giant bubbles filled with hydrogen gas, when the Universe was very young.
“Like people, galaxies also tend to stay close to each other. And as we see closer and closer to the beginning of the Universe, galaxies are becoming rarer, either they are not there or likely hidden by the hydrogen fog,” said Dr Tilvi.
This research finding was recently published in the prestigious international journal, ‘The Astrophysical Journal’.
“To make this discovery, it took us a few years to collect the astronomical data using some of the best telescopes in the world including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Using these advanced telescopes, we are just beginning to get a glimpse of our Universe when it was very young,” he said.
Presently, Dr Tilvi is working at the Mitchell Institute of Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, USA, and is a member of several large international collaborations including a galaxy survey project called the CANDELS survey – the largest Hubble Space Telescope survey ever undertaken. He did his primary education in Goa with Post-graduate education from Goa University.
“Our Universe was not always this beautiful, glittering with stars and galaxies. In fact, there were no stars and no galaxies in the beginning. How did first stars, first galaxies formed and how did we humans evolved is one of the biggest quests in astronomy today,” he added.
Using current technologies, Astronomers are pushing the limits to discover the farthest galaxies in the Universe.
