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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

When was cosmic dawn? Some of the most distant galaxies known hold a clue

Light from the early days of the Universe helps to pin-point when the stars switched on after the Big Bang.
Still of a video showing the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies

A snapshot of galaxies and stars evolving a few hundred million years after the Big Bang (image extracted from a simulation). Gas filaments are depicted in purple, starlight in white, and highly energetic radiation from the most massive stars in yellow. Credit: Harley Katz, Beecroft Fellow/Univ. Oxford

If you know someone’s age, it’s easy to work out when they were born. Now astronomers have performed that same calculation for some of the Universe’s most ancient galaxies. That has allowed them to estimate the timing of cosmic dawn — the period when the very first stars appeared.

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Nature 595, 152 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01766-6

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