cosmic dark ages tagged posts

Reionization as illustrated by data from the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Scientists can explain why the universe has enough energy to become transparent. The study marks the first quantitative study of how the gas content within galaxies scales with the amount of interstellar dust. This analysis shows that the gas in galaxies is like a “picket fence,” where some parts of the galaxy have little gas and are directly visible, whereas other parts have lots of gas and are effectively opaque to ionizing radiation. The ionization of hydrogen is important because of its effects on how galaxies grow and evolve...

Composite image of the galaxy cluster from three different filters on the Hubble Space Telescope. The wave charts (insets at left) show spectra of the multiply imaged systems. The fact that they share peaks at the same wavelength shows that they belong to the same source. At bottom right, the Keck I and Keck II Telescopes at Hawaii’s the W. M. Keck Observatory. Credit: BRADAC/HST/W. M. Keck Observatory

Discovery could help explain how ‘cosmic dark ages’ ended. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the researchers detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago. The researchers made the discovery using gravitational lensing to see the incredibly faint object, which was born just after the Big Bang...