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 had discerned effects of that first starlight on the universe when it was only 180 million years old. The observations take astronomers farther back into the mists of time than even the Hubble Space Telescope can see and raised new questions about how well astronomers really know the early days of the cosmos, and about the nature of the mysterious so-called dark matter whose gravity sculpts the luminous galaxies.
“We have seen indirectly evidence of very early stars in the universe — stars that would have formed by the time the universe was only 180 million years old,” said Judd Bowman of Arizona State, leader of the experiment known as EDGES, for Experiment to Detect Global EoR, in an email. Dr. Bowman and his colleagues published their results in Nature Wednesday. Read more...