Faint ‘whispers’ from the Moon may unveil the the first billion years of the Universe’s evolution, which has yet to be observed in detail. Very little is known about the first stars and galaxies that came into existence in this early period. One avenue to explore this epoch is to study the faint radio waves from neutral hydrogen atoms.
Thirteen billion years ago our universe was dark. There were neither stars nor galaxies; there was only hydrogen gas left over after the Big Bang. Eventually hydrogen atoms began to clump together to form stars—the very first ones to exist—initiating a major phase in the evolution of the universe, known as the Epoch of Reionization, or EoR.
“You’ve heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter,” said Julian Munoz of Harvard University. “However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales.”
During this dark age, there was no light-based signal we can study —”there was no visible light” said University of Washington professor of physics, Miguel Morales, about the dark age, the starless era, a gap of several hundred million years following the Big Bang devoid of data, when elementary particles combined to form hydrogen but no stars or galaxies existed yet to light up the Universe.
The neutral hydrogen gas that filled the universe during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang absorbed ambient light, leading to what cosmologists and science fiction authors poetically call the “dark ages,” although the cosmos was filled with a diffuse ambient light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the “afterglow” of the Big Bang.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
New Insights from a Dark-Matter-Free Galaxy Revives Controversial Gravity Theory (Weekend Feature)
Could An Alien Civilization Change the Laws of Physics to Gravity Powered Batteries (Planet Earth Report)
Our Sun as Never Seen Before (and a New Discovery)
Did the Milky Way Lose Its Original Black Hole to Will the James Webb Space Telescope Reveal Another Earth? (The Galaxy Report)
Radio Galaxies of the Early Universe -Would Take Several Million Years to Cross at Speed of Light
Before the “Bang” –The Primordial Universe NASA Probing How Life Began on Earth to Alpha Centauri a Billion Years Older than Our Solar System (The Galaxy Report)“Simultaneously Beautiful and Terrifying” –First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole to A New Earth Rises (Planet Earth Report)Extraterrestrial Lighthouses to Harvard’s Avi Loeb & Company On Our Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Image (The Galaxy Report)
Earth’s Astronomers on the Significance of the First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
