Word: bangs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bang...
...observation of the most distant quasars--objects believed to be giant black holes swallowing huge volumes of gas at the cores of young galaxies. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a comprehensive scan of the heavens, has turned up several of these from about a billion years after the Big Bang. By watching how the light of quasars is altered by surrounding gas, astronomers have concluded that there was still some atomic hydrogen around then, although not much...
...WMAP satellite, launched to look for light left from the Big Bang using a broadly analogous technique, determined the clearing out of hydrogen between the stars was well under way much earlier, just half a billion years post--Big Bang. "Theorists have been telling us that it should have happened fairly quickly once it began," says Michael Strauss, a Princeton University astronomer and deputy project scientist for the Sloan survey. "But the observations may be telling us otherwise...
...focus on one tiny region of the universe by the Hubble, the Spitzer space telescope (which operates in infrared wavelengths) and the European Space Organization's ground-based Very Large Telescope in Chile revealed the existence of a galaxy dating to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang that was far larger and more mature looking than the primordial dwarf galaxies everyone assumed they would see. "It was unexpected," admits Mark Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, in Tucson, Ariz., who worked on the project. "But maybe it shouldn't have been." The theorists might have things...
Ordinarily, Ellis explains, you could never see small galaxies a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang; they're just too faint for any telescope now in existence. But the universe itself has supplied a way of boosting a telescope's magnifying power. The theory of relativity says massive objects warp the space around them, diverting light rays from their original path. In the 1930s Albert Einstein realized this meant a star, say, could act as a lens, distorting and amplifying the light from something behind it. In practice, he said, it probably happens so rarely that we will...