Recently released updates from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite suggest stars are younger than we thought they were.
New maps of cosmic background radiation reveals the "reionization" process may be more recent than previously believed, the International School of Advanced Sciences reported.
"According to Planck's observations, stars may be younger than believed, in bearing with other independent astrophysical indicators, and this finding may have major consequences on our attempts to understand the dark components of the Universe," said Carlo Baccigalupi, SISSA cosmologist and coordinator of the SISSA group involved in the Planck experiment.
Reionization is a process associated with star formation that has been dated back the "dark ages" of the universe, which refers to a time before starlight existed. The findings are based on the publication of maps of "polarized" cosmic background radiation, which is light left over from the brilliant Big Bang.
The NASA WMAP satellite, launched in 2001 was the first to provide maps of the reionization process, providing an estimate of when it took place; these new findings suggest reionization may have occurred approximately 550 million years after the Big Bang, which is 100 million years later than WMAP had estimated.
"The contribution of the Trieste team involved in producing maps for the LFI on board Planck - consisting of SISSA and INAF-OATS scientists coordinated by Andrea Zacchei - was to generate new maps of the polarized light seen by the LFI which cover the whole sky. Now we're awaiting data from the high-frequency instrument (HFI), whose maps are mostly constructed by the French team. These additional maps should provide confirmation and a clearer picture of the evidence we detected," Baccigalupi concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
