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The First Light in the Universe

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The First Light in the Universe The first light in the Universe The WMAP satellite. After three phasing loops around m a e Earth, WMAP flew just behind T e c the orbit of the Moon, three n e i c weeks after launch S P A M W / A S ience Team A c BE S N CO f / o A AS y N s f e o t r sy u e rt o u c o c e e g g a a m m I I Ana Lopes and Henri An artist’s impression of the COBE spacecraft, Boffin take us on a launched by NASA into an Earth orbit in 1989 to trip back in time – make a full-sky map of the cosmic microwave back - probing the history of ground radiation left over from the Big Bang. The first the Universe. results were released in 1992 Photographs of the Universe ave you ever wondered when Historians often use photographs the first lights in the Universe It was not until about 400 000 years and other pictures to tell them about began to shine? Most of us have after the Big Bang that light was able the past, and in this respect, astro- Hwatched the rising of the Sun in the to travel freely in the Universe. Ever nomers are no different. Using the morning, the dawn of a new day. since the Big Bang, the Universe COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) Astronomers go a step further and has been expanding and cooling (for and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy w1 look for the first sources of light – a description, see Boffin & Pierce- Probe (WMAP ) satellites to map the peering into the history of the Price, 2007 ), stretching that primeval cosmic microwave background radia - Universe using powerful telescopes. light from its initial high frequency, tion, astronomers have created a ‘pho - Their ultimate aspiration is even more until it can be detected today as tograph’ of the Universe as it was ambitious: to trace the entire history photons in the microwave range: approximately 400 000 years after the of the Universe, from its birth – the cosmic microwave background Big Bang. The data from COBE won Big Bang – to the present day, almost radiation, coming from all over the John Mather and George Smoot the w2 14 000 million (14 billion) years later. Universe. 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. 48 Science in School Issue 13 : Autumn 2009 www.scienceinschool.org Science topics Original image courtesy of NASA This article offers interest - ing and detailed informa - tion about modern research into the history of the Universe and its evo - lution. It could be used for interdisciplinary teaching, for example in physics, astronomy, astrophysics or philosophy. As well as providing valuable back - W ground reading, teachers E I could use it to develop V educational materials. E Vangelis Koltsakis, Greece R The electromagnetic spectrum Original image courtesy of SG Djorgovski and Digital Media Center, Caltech The standard cosmological model of how the Universe evolved tells us An outline of cosmic history that by about 400 000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe had cooled to Time since the Big Bang The Big Bang about 3000 degrees Kelvin, a tempera - (years) the Universe filled with ionised gas ture low enough for all the electrons ~300 thousand The Universe becomes and protons to combine, forming neu - neutral and opaque tral hydrogen from the ionised gas. The ‘dark ages’ start Electrons in neutral hydrogen (as in other atoms or molecules) absorb photons very efficiently , so a universe Galaxies and quasars begin full of neutral hydrogen is opaque. In to form contrast, when protons and electrons The reionisation starts ~500 million are separate, they cannot capture pho - tons so a universe full of ionised gas – as was the case until about 400 000 years after the Big Bang, and is again the case today – is relatively transpar - The ‘dark ages’ end ent. The COBE and WMAP maps show us the Universe during its Reionisation complete, the ~1 billion Universe becomes transpar - opaque stage, at the beginning of the ent again ‘dark ages’ of the Universe. This peri - od came to an end when the Universe Galaxies evolve became ionised again (see diagram to the right) . We also have ‘photographs’ of a ~9 billion Solar System forms much more recent Universe: galaxies full of stars, as they were 1000 million Today: Astronomers are years after the Big Bang – once the ~13 billion figuring it out Universe had become transparent again. Because of the finite speed of -1 light (300 000 km s ), the light from www.scienceinschool.org Science in School Issue 13 : Autumn 2009 49 Image courtesy of NASA / WMAP Science Team WMAP observes the first light of the Universe – the afterglow of the Big Bang. This light emerged approximately 400 000 years after the Big Bang. Patterns imprinted on this light encode the events that hap - pened only a tiny fraction of a second after distant objects takes much longer to the Big Bang. In turn, the patterns are the reach us than that from neighbouring seeds of the development of the structures of galaxies we see now, billions of years objects; we therefore see these distant after the Big Bang objects as they were a very long time ago. By looking at very distant objects, astronomers were able to see the light that has travelled for almost 13 000 million years – that is, they saw those objects as they had been less than 1000 million years after the Big Bang. But what happened between these two photographs, between the release of the cosmic microwave background radiation 400 000 years after the Big Bang and the light emitted by these very distant galaxies, nearly 1000 mil - f Image courtesy o NASA / WMAP Science lion years later? When and how did Team the cosmic fog lift? What changed a sea of particles almost devoid of structure into a Universe lit by numerous stars in young galaxies ? As Harvard University astronomer Abraham Loeb puts it: “The situation that astronomers face is similar to having a photo album containing the first ultrasound image of an unborn baby and some additional photos of that same person as a teenager and an The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from five years of adult ” ( Loeb , 2006). What scientists WMAP data. The image reveals 13.7 billion-year-old temperature fluctuations (red do not know – but are trying to figure regions are warmer and blue are cooler) that correspond to the seeds that grew to out – is when and how the very first become the galaxies stars and galaxies were born. Loeb continues: “Astronomers are currently mage courtesy of NASA, ESA, searching for the missing pages of the I S Beckw ith (S pace Tele cosmic photo album, which will show sco pe Sc how the Universe evolved during its ien ce In s infancy and made the building blocks ti tu te ) of galaxies like our own Milky Way.” a n d Before any stars were formed , the t h e H Universe contained mostly hydrogen, u b b helium and some traces of light ele - l e U l t r ments (as described in Rebusco et al. , a D e e p 2007). To ionise hydrogen requires F i e l d T e a energy in excess of 13.6 eV – the sort m of energy level corresponding to pho - tons in the ultraviolet (UV) domain. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. This Therefore whatever reionised the galaxy-studded view represents a ‘deep’ core sample of the Universe, cutting across Universe must have released signifi - billions of light-years. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, cant amounts of UV radiation . and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, Although astronomers are still uncer - existing when the Universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – the tain what could have released this larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipses – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old ionising UV radiation, they speculate 50 Science in School Issue 13 : Autumn 2009 www.scienceinschool.org Science topics Peterson’s prediction: they detected The effect of reionisation on quasar spectra an unambiguous trough in the spec - Reionised, transparent Ionized bubbles in a still Opaque neutral gas in trum of a very distant quasar discov - Universe largely neutral universe the early universe (before reionisation) ered during the Sloan Digital Sky w3 Survey , a huge astronomical survey Line of sight to The quasar that examined the spectra of about a the quasar hundred thousand quasars. The trough was in the infra -red part of the spectrum, because the quasar is so far away : its light started the journey h c e t l towards Earth only about 900 million a C , r years after the Big Bang, and so has e t n e C taken almost 13 000 million years to a y i t d i e reach us , during which time its initial - s M n l e a t t ly UV light has been stretched (red - i g n i I D shifted ) into the infra -red by the d n a i expansion of the Universe. Quasars k s v o g slightly closer to Earth did not show r o j D such a trough. This indicated that the G Wavelength or redshift S f last patches of neutral hydrogen in o y s e t the Universe were ionised about 900 r u o Isolated transmission spikes correspond to the Dark regions correspond to the still opaque, c million years after the Big Bang.
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