Using the Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) telescope, the Large-Aperture Experiment to Detect the Dark Ages (LEDA), and other observatories to look for the onset of reionization and the first stars.
These instruments are designed to detect radio waves emitted by hydrogen gas during the cosmic “dark age”..
Since around 1997–2003, the problem is believed to have been solved by most cosmologists: modern cosmological measurements lead to a precise estimate of the age of the universe (i.e. time since the Big Bang) of 13.8 billion years, and recent age estimates for the oldest objects are either younger than this, or .
Cosmic Dark Ages and First Light
When the CMB formed, the ordinary matter in the universe transitioned from a hot opaque plasma to incandescent hydrogen and helium gas.
Astronomers call this the “dark age” of the universe, since no stars had formed yet..
This period lasted for hundreds of millions of years and is often called the time before the universe began because it was devoid of life and of light.
In conclusion, the cosmological dark age was a time before the stars and light in the universe was made..
Beginning about 400,000 years after the Big Bang and lasting hundreds of millions of years, this so-called dark age of the universe marked the last time when empty space really was empty; no planets, no suns, no galaxies, no life — just a fog of hydrogen atoms forged by the Big Bang and left to slosh through the Dec 6, 2019.
The dark ages of the universe was a period in which no new light was generated because the cosmic microwave background radiation was no longer being released and the stars had not collapsed to densities large enough to power the process of nuclear fusion through which light is generated..
Astronomers call this time period the cosmic dark ages, and they are slowly unraveling the mystery of how and when it ended.
The obvious challenge is that astronomers rely on light.
Without it, direct observational evidence of anything is hard to come by.Mar 2, 2020.
Increasingly precise measurements of this radiation have revealed unprecedented details about the earliest cosmic moments.
But from then until the emergence of galaxies big and bright enough for today’s telescopes, scientists don’t have any information.
Ever mysterious, these dark ages are the final frontier of cosmology.
Looking at an object, either with our eyes or with a telescope, requires photons of light to hit some sort of detector, whether it’s your retina or a camera.
But the cosmic dark ages were a time when the universe was enveloped by a fog of neutral hydrogen that trapped the light of the first stars and galaxies.
The dark ages are when astronomers believe the tiny perturbations visible in the cosmic microwave background transformed into the large-scale structures that we see throughout the universe today.
This story comes from our special January 2021 issue, “The Beginning and the End of the Universe.” Click here to purchase the full issue.
In Big Bang cosmology, shortly after the blazingly bright Big Bang itself, there came a time when the universe was utterly dark.
This period, before the first stars were born, and is thought to have lasted several hundred million years in our 13.8-billion-year-old universe.
Astronomers call it the Cosmic Dark Ages.
Topics referred to by the same term
