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A surprising chill before the cosmic dawn

An experiment to estimate when stars began to form in the Universe suggests that gas temperatures just before stars appeared had fallen well below predicted limits, and that dark matter is not as shadowy as was thought.
  1. Lincoln Greenhill

    1. Lincoln Greenhill is in the Radio and Geoastronomy Division, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA, and in the Department of Astronomy, Harvard University, Cambridge.

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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 occurred1, but no data-driven constraints on the timing have been available. In a paper in Nature, Bowman et al.2 report what might be the first detection of the thermal footprints of these stars, tracking back to 180 million years after the Big Bang.

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Nature 555, 38-39 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02310-9

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 09 March 2018: In the News & Views article 'A surprising chill before the cosmic dawn' by Lincoln Greenhill (Nature 555, 38–39; 2018), the seventh paragraph incorrectly said that a putative absorption signal looks back as far as 180 million years ago. This should have said "as far back as 180 million years after the Big Bang".

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