Cosmos Seeded with Heavy Elements During Violent Youth
By Lori Ann White
New evidence of heavy elements spread evenly between the galaxies of the giant Perseus cluster supports the theory that the universe underwent a turbulent and violent youth more than 10 billion years ago. That explosive period was responsible for seeding the cosmos with the heavy elements central to life itself.
Researchers from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), jointly run by Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shed light on this important era by analyzing 84 separate sets of X-ray telescope observations from the Japanese-US Suzaku satellite. Their results appear today in the journal Nature.
"We saw that iron is spread out between the galaxies remarkably smoothly," said KIPAC's Norbert Werner, lead author of the paper. "That means it had to be present in the intergalactic gas before the Perseus cluster formed."
The even distribution of these elements supports the idea that they were created at least 10 to 12 billion years ago. According to the paper, during this time of intense star formation, billions of exploding stars created vast quantities of heavy elements in the alchemical furnaces of their own destruction. This was also the epoch when black holes in the hearts of galaxies were at their most energetic.
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http://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2013-10-30-Perseus-Cluster-Metal.aspx
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