Don Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC June 12, 1995

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Emil Venere
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
(Phone: 410/516-7160)

RELEASE: 95-87

ASTRO-2 PROVIDES FIRST DEFINITIVE DETECTION OF PRIMORDIAL

HELIUM

Astronomers using NASA's Astro-2 observatory today

announced the first definitive detection of one of the two
original building blocks of the universe -- the element
helium created in the Big Bang explosion.

The finding that the chemical element helium is

widespread in the early universe confirms a critical
prediction of the Big Bang cosmological theory and provides
clues to several other major mysteries in astronomy.

The announcement was made by Dr. Arthur Davidsen of

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, at a meeting of
the American Astronomical Society in Pittsburgh, PA.
Davidsen is the Principal Investigator for the Hopkins
Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT), one of three ultraviolet (UV)
instruments on the Astro-2 observatory which was operated
in the payload bay of the Space Shuttle Endeavour during a
17-day mission in March of this year.

"It's a very rewarding feeling to find that we

actually have achieved what we set out to do at the
beginning of the project 17 years ago," said Davidsen, a
professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Physics and
Astronomy. "It certainly helps confirm the Big Bang."

"This long-sought primordial helium represents a

major milestone in astronomy and is the most significant
achievement for the very successful Astro-2 mission," said
Dr. Daniel Weedman, Director of NASA's Astrophysics
Division in Washington, DC.

The data enabled scientists to estimate the

abundance of helium and hydrogen in the primordial
universe, confirming predictions made by the standard Big
Bang theory as to how much gas was produced at the
beginning of the universe.

The observation also has allowed astronomers to

detect a portion of the invisible "dark matter" in the
early universe, a discovery that might shed light on what
constitutes some of the "missing mass" in today's universe.

Confirming the Big Bang Theory

The findings matched an important prediction of the

Big Bang theory -- that a primordial mixture of helium and
hydrogen was created at the birth of the universe. By
showing that significant amounts of helium existed in the
early universe, the discovery reaffirms the theory that the
chemical elements hydrogen and helium were formed in the
first three minutes after the Big Bang. The heavy
elements, (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, iron, etc.)
come from nuclear reactions in the centers of stars, and
thus didn't form until some time after the Big Bang.

Davidsen said HUT's mission on Astro-2 was the

culmination of his goal, conceived 17 years ago, to find
the hypothetical "primordial intergalactic medium" created
by the Big Bang. He reasoned that astronomers should be
able to detect the helium gas by using a spectrograph in
space to measure within a range of light called the far
ultraviolet spectrum.

Hopkins astronomers were able to detect the helium

by analyzing far ultraviolet light from a distant quasar
called HS1700+64, about 10 billion light years away. By
observing such a remote object, astronomers were
essentially looking back to a time when the universe was
less than a quarter of its present age, a time when most of
the original hydrogen and helium gas produced by the Big
Bang had not yet condensed into stars and galaxies.

As ultraviolet light from the quasar shines through

the vast intervening space, it also shines through the
intergalactic medium of hydrogen and helium, like a
headlight through fog. Intense radiation from early
galaxies and quasars completely ionized the hydrogen
(stripped the hydrogen atoms of their single electrons),
making hydrogen atoms invisible to detection by
spectroscopy because they cannot absorb any of the quasar's
light. But helium atoms in their natural state have two
electrons; some helium atoms retained an electron despite
the ionizing radiation, and HUT was able to detect the
small portion of helium atoms that were not fully ionized.

From the data collected, astrophysicists are able to

calculate how much total intergalactic helium and hydrogen
may exist. The degree of helium absorption detected by the
spectrograph suggests that a massive amount of gas was
present in the intergalactic medium about 10 billion years ago.

"We are only seeing the tail of the dog," Davidsen

said. "It's enough of a tail to know that it's a very big dog."

Astronomers have been searching for the primordial

gas for 30 years, ever since astrophysicists James P. Gunn
and Bruce Peterson first postulated that scientists should
be able to detect the hydrogen originally created in the
Big Bang by analyzing the light from quasars, the most
luminous objects in the universe.

But scientists, using a variety of telescopes and

instruments, were not able to detect the primordial
hydrogen and concluded that it may have been completely
ionized by intense radiation. To detect the primordial
medium, astronomers decided to focus on the helium instead.

A major stumbling block in confirming the

intergalactic medium's existence has been the technical
difficulty involved in detecting the helium. The far
ultraviolet spectral range is best suited to the search for
the intergalactic medium because it enables astronomers to
study quasars that are just the right distance from Earth:
they are not so far away that their light is heavily
"contaminated" by galaxies in the foreground, yet they are
distant enough that their light is stretched into the
proper redshift to be observed.

The HUT data also appear to have provided a partial

answer to the puzzle of dark matter. The observable
universe adds up to no more than one percent of the mass
required to produce the gravitational force that seems to
be present. The standard Big Bang theory predicts that a
portion of the remaining, unseen mass is in the form of
normal, or baryonic matter -- the stuff people and planets
are made of. Theories suggest that up to 10 percent of the
missing mass is baryonic, and the rest is possibly some
form of exotic matter -- perhaps a variety of unknown
subatomic particles that are difficult to detect.
Calculations based on HUT's data show that the primordial
hydrogen and helium are about equal to the total amount of
baryonic dark matter scientists believe exists, Davidsen
said.

- end -

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