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Galaxy cluster illuminates the cosmic dark ages

Observations of a distant cluster of galaxies suggest that star formation began there only 370 million years after the Big Bang. The results provide key details about where and when the first stars and galaxies emerged in the Universe.
  1. Nina A. Hatch

    1. Nina A. Hatch is in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.

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Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe was completely dark. Stars and galaxies, which provide the Universe with light, had not yet formed, and the Universe consisted of a primordial soup of neutral hydrogen and helium atoms and invisible ‘dark matter’. During these cosmic dark ages, which lasted for several hundred million years, the first stars and galaxies emerged. Unfortunately, observations of this era are challenging because dark-age galaxies are exceptionally faint1. Writing in Nature, Willis et al.2 provide a glimpse of what happened during the dark ages by doing some galactic archaeology. By measuring the ages of stars in one of the most distant clusters of galaxies known, the authors located galaxies that formed stars in the dark ages, close to the earliest possible time that stars could emerge.

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Nature 577, 36-37 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03893-7

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