Universe's First Stars Detected? Get the Facts.

[Judi Lynn]

Painstaking new work suggests that the burning balls of gas started forming about 180 million years after the cosmos burst into being.

By Nadia Drake
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 28, 2018

Stars are our constant companions in the night sky, but seas of twinkling lights weren’t always a feature of the cosmos. Now, scientists peering back into deep time suggest that the earliest stars didn’t turn on until about 180 million years after the big bang, when the universe as we know it exploded into existence.

For decades, teams of scientists have been chasing—in fact, racing—to detect the signatures of these first stars. The new detection, from a project called EDGES, is in the form of a radio signal triggered when light from those stars began interacting with the hydrogen gas that filled primordial empty space.

If the signal stands up to scrutiny, the detection simultaneously opens up a new line of cosmological inquiry and offers a few conundrums to tackle.

“The era of cosmic dawn has been entirely uncharted territory until now,” says physicist Cynthia Chiang of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. “It's extremely exciting to see a new glimpse of this slice of the universe's history, and the EDGES detection is the initial step toward understanding the nature of the first stars in more detail.”

More:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/first-stars-universe-big-bang-edges-space-science/