Space Telescope Study to Yield New Data on Quasar Mysteries

The Hubble Space Telescope has made its first observation of the chemical makeup of a distant quasar that may yield clues to the makeup of the early universe, NASA officials said Sunday.

Using the telescope’s Faint Object Spectrograph, astronomers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and UC San Diego observed the spectrum of a faint quasar, called UM675, about 12 billion light years from Earth. (A light year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 186,000 miles.)

Quasars, the brightest objects in the universe, emit energy that seems too intense to come from a source so compact. Although quasars were discovered in 1963, scientists still understand little about them.

E. Margaret Burbidge, the UC San Diego astronomer who led the team, said that one purpose of the eight-hour observation was to look for the “signature” of helium in the far ultraviolet spectrum.

The strength of that helium signature, after analysis, should reveal something about how much helium existed in the early universe, Burbidge said.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, but scientists say that not all of it could have come from the stars’ nuclear fusion, which transforms hydrogen to helium. So it has been theorized that most of the helium came from the “big bang” explosion that some astronomers think created the universe about 15 billion years ago.

The part of a quasar’s radiation that includes the main spectral lines produced by helium cannot be picked up by a ground-based telescope because it is blocked by Earth’s ozone layer.