First Stars Envisioned illustration NSF

Why Finding The First Stars In Our Universe Puts Us Closer To The Big Bang

March 12, 2018

From Colorado Public Radio: Astronomers have detected the first stars ever to shine in the universe, an event that happened more than 13 billion years ago. No one’s actually seen them -- scientists picked up their radio waves. But Doug Duncan, director emeritus of the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, says...

EDGES Instrument

When Stars Were Born: Earliest Starlight’s Effects Are Detected

Feb. 28, 2018

From The New York Times: It was morning in the universe and much colder than anyone had expected when light from the first stars began to tickle and excite their dark surroundings nearly 14 billion years ago. Astronomers using a small radio telescope in Australia reported on Wednesday that they...

EDGES instrument in Western Australia

Astronomers detect light from the Universe’s first stars

Feb. 28, 2018

From Nature: Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe — around 180 million years after the Big Bang. The signal is a fingerprint left on background radiation by hydrogen that absorbed some of this primordial light...

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A surprising chill before the cosmic dawn

Feb. 28, 2018

From Nature: The first stars to form generated copious fluxes of ultraviolet radiation that suffused the early Universe — a phenomenon referred to as the cosmic dawn. Many calculations have been performed to estimate when this occurred, but no data-driven constraints on the timing have been available. In a paper...

Astronomers detect ancient signal from first stars in universe

Signal Detected from Cosmic Dawn

Feb. 28, 2018

From the BBC: Scientists say they have observed a signature on the sky from the very first stars to shine in the Universe. They did it with the aid of a small radio telescope in the Australian outback that was tuned to detect the earliest ever evidence for hydrogen. This...