There Was No Light at the Start of the Universe

The most recent investigations conducted on the earliest days of the Cosmos have revealed that the Big Bang was followed by several hundred million years of darkness, in which absolutely no light was produced. The first stars and galaxies began developing after that period.

Because of the total lack of light, those earliest days of the Universe are called the cosmic dark ages. These conclusions were derived from observations conducted on the radiation left behind by the Big Bang. The leftover radiation is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

When the quantum fluctuations of the Big Bang inflated the Universe from the size of a molecule to several thousands times that in a single fraction of a second, various states of matter existed within.

Theoretical physicists say that various unstable dimensions existed within as well. As the Universe was expanding, the most unstable ones collapsed upon themselves, until the four we see today remains. The three dimensions and time remain the only observable ones today.

In the first hundred million years of its existence, the Universe was filled with amorphous masses of hydrogen and helium particles, which were eventually drawn towards each other to form massive molecular clouds.

Eventually, gravity prevailed, and these clouds collapsed, ignited, and formed the first stars. That is the time when the first photon stream light up the Cosmos. The event also marked the transition from the dark ages to the Universe we know today.

The transition is called the Reionization Epoch (EOR), and it represented the target of a new research conducted by two astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The team knew that they couldn't possibly detect the first light, and so they took another approach to studying EOR.

MIT Haystack Observatory research affiliate Alan Rogers and Arizona State University assistant professor Judd Bowman decided to search for the radio emissions originating in the hydrogen gas that spanned the distance between the earliest galaxies.

The group believes that those emissions are only now beginning to reach our location, and that various information about the EOR might be inscribed within.

Rogers and Bowman received financial support for their study from NASA and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).