AstroTalk Episode May 9, 2019

New Clues How Ancient Galaxies Lit Up the Ancient Universe. NASAs Goddard Celebrates its 60 Year Anniversary. Honoring Ellison Onizuka, The First Asian American to Launch into Space. to Fly in Space.

2:06pm - 2:54pm

Cosmologists: How do they up with their obscure and exotic theories? Infinite universes? Why is the space between galaxies expanding? Spitzer has revealed that some of the Us earliest galaxies were brighter than expected, because they released incredibly high levels of ionizing radiation. This Epoch of Reionization transformed the U from being mostly opaque to the brilliant U of stars we have today. The ancient galaxies were found to be especially bright in a few wavelengths of infrared light, explaining their brilliant glow. 100 million - million years after the big bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen gas that probably had begun to coalesce into stars, which then formed the first galaxies. 1 billion years after the BB, the U began sparkling. Electrons of the neutral hydrogen gas had been stripped away in a process known as ionization. The Epoch of Reionization - the changeover from a universe full of neutral hydrogen to one filled with ionized hydrogen - is well documented. See https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7397. NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center celebrates its 60 year anniversary. Robert H. Goddard is considered the father of modern rocket science. Goddard experimented on his aunt's farm by launching the first liquid fueled rocket.