From Popular Mechanics: "If that thing goes up 200 feet and explodes, I'm jumping in the water"—so says one of the tens of thousands of spectators who made the pilgrimage to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. We're looking at Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket on the launch pad about three miles...
From BGR Media: Scientists have long attempted to paint a detailed picture of what the universe looked like in the immediate aftermath of the big bang, and new research suggests that some of their most basic assumptions have been entirely incorrect. Researchers studying some of the most ancient regions of...
From Nature: The cosmic radio-frequency spectrum is expected to show a strong absorption signal corresponding to the 21-centimetre-wavelength transition of atomic hydrogen around redshift 20, which arises from Lyman-α radiation from some of the earliest stars. By observing this 21-centimetre signal—either its sky-averaged spectrum or maps of its fluctuations, obtained...
From Nature: After stars formed in the early Universe, their ultraviolet light is expected, eventually, to have penetrated the primordial hydrogen gas and altered the excitation state of its 21-centimetre hyperfine line. This alteration would cause the gas to absorb photons from the cosmic microwave background, producing a spectral distortion...
From NPR: Scientists have probed a period of the universe's early history that no one has been able to explore before — and they got a surprise: It was far colder in the young universe, before the first stars blinked on, than astronomers previously thought. What's more, that cosmic chill...
From The New York Times: It was morning in the universe and much colder than anyone had expected when light from the first stars began to tickle and excite their dark surroundings nearly 14 billion years ago. Astronomers using a small radio telescope in Australia reported on Wednesday that they...
From Nature: Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe — around 180 million years after the Big Bang. The signal is a fingerprint left on background radiation by hydrogen that absorbed some of this primordial light...
From IFL Science: In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists say they have found a signal from some of the earliest stars in the universe, giving us an unparalleled glimpse into the dawn of the cosmos. The signals originate from hydrogen gas from just 180 million years after the Big Bang, itself...
From The Verge: The first observation of the earliest stars in the Universe suggests they were forming about 180 million years after the Big Bang. The radio signal used to make this observation, though indirect, backs up some theoretical models about the evolution of the early Universe. In the beginning,...
From Nature: The first stars to form generated copious fluxes of ultraviolet radiation that suffused the early Universe — a phenomenon referred to as the cosmic dawn. Many calculations have been performed to estimate when this occurred, but no data-driven constraints on the timing have been available. In a paper...
