4/9/2009
A team of international researchers has been given a glimpse at the birth of stars.
It's all thanks to a two-tonne telescope, dangling beneath a 33-storey balloon 60 kilometres above the earth. It was a cheap alternative to a satellite mission and it has produced invaluable information for the international team of researchers.
The team includes astronomers and astrophysicists from the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. It says its experiments helped them track half the starlight in the universe to a galaxy several billion light years away.
The telescope crashed upon landing in 2006, but researchers were able to retrieve its information. The team's study is being published today in the Journal Nature.
Douglas Scott of UBC says they'd like to find out where and when all the stars in the universe formed. But he says researchers have a lot of work to do to realize that. (The Canadian Press, ccg)
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Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of British Columbia
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