A surprising chill before the cosmic dawn
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 , Bowman et al. report what might be the first detection of the thermal footprints of these stars, tracking back to 180 million years after the Big Bang.
Less than one million years after the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of atomic gas (chiefly hydrogen) and a form of matter that outweighs regular matter by more than five times but has yet to be seen directly. Measurements over decades have indicated that, oddly enough, this ‘dark’ matter interacts with itself and with regular matter only through the action of gravity. It was mainly the gravity of dark matter that amplified small, localized density perturbations in the Universe shortly after the Big Bang to generate the first large-scale structures. But it was the hydrogen within these perturbations that collapsed piecemeal to form stars, bringing about the cosmic dawn.
The observable thermal footprints of early stars derive from small variations in the ratio of the number of interstellar hydrogen atoms found in two particular energy states; a transition between these states causes a photon to be emitted or absorbed at a characteristic radio frequency. The ratio reflects the degree of excitation of the hydrogen, and can be expressed as a temperature, known as the atomic spin temperature (TS).