The interstellar cloud was detected by scientists at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano. The discovery of such an ancient relic, Fred Robert and Professor Michael Murphy at Swinburne University of Technology, will allow scientists to unlock secrets of the make-up of the early universe. According to Fred Robert, the lead study author, the “most compelling” explanation for a singular gassy cloud to remain untouched for so long is it is a time capsule of the universe’s earliest minutes.
Mr Robert, a PhD student at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement: “Everywhere we look, the gas in the universe is polluted by waste heavy elements from exploding stars.”
He added: “But this particular cloud seems pristine, unpolluted by stars even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.”
According to a forthcoming study in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the cloud, labeled LLS1723, shows no visible traces of any elements heavier than hydrogen.
Hydrogen is the primeval atom, produced at the beginning, in the hot, dense conditions of the birth of the universe itself.
Strangely, the region has maintained a primitive composition of hydrogen particles, unsullied by any other element and untouched by change throughout billions of years of the universe’s evolution.
The gas cloud has remained in time locked stillness, never condensing to form stars and so having no traces of the subsequent heavier elements that follow star creation.
Every other element on the periodic table comes from fusion reactions inside stars, and scatters into space when those stars explode as supernovae.
This area of cosmic gas presents the time before ancient hydrogen and helium atoms fused to form the first stars and then came the rest of the elements in the periodic table.
Professor Michele Fumagalli of Durham University and John O’Meara, formerly a professor at St. Michael’s College have detected two of these relic clouds before and suggest that there could be more lying undetected in the cold gulfs between the stars.
“It’s now possible to survey for these fossil relics of the Big Bang,” says Professor Michael Murphy.
He added: “That will tell us exactly how rare they are and help us understand how some gas formed stars and galaxies in the early universe, and why some didn’t.”
Many more of these enigmatic clouds of primitive hydrogen may lie undetected in the intergalactic medium.