Word: bangs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more important, it would give astrophysicists their first real glimpse into a crucial and mysterious era in the evolution of the cosmos. Known as the Dark Ages of the universe, it's the 200 million-year period (more or less) after the last flash of light from the Big Bang faded and the first blush of sun-like stars began to appear. What happened during the Dark Ages set the stage for the cosmos we see today, with its billions of magnificent galaxies and everything that they contain--the shimmering gas clouds, the fiery stars, the tiny planets, the mammoth...
...first of those hints comes from the universe-wide flash of light that followed nearly half a million years after the Big Bang. Before that flash occurred, according to the widely accepted "standard model" of cosmology, our entire cosmos had swelled from a space smaller than an atom to something 100 billion miles across. It was then a seething maelstrom of matter so hot that subatomic particles trying to form into atoms would have been blasted apart instantly and so dense that light couldn't have traveled more than a short distance before being absorbed. If you could somehow live...
...universe expanded, it finally cooled down enough to allow atoms to form and light to shine out across open space. The accidental discovery of that light back in the 1960s convinced astronomers that the Big Bang was a real event, not just a theoretical construct...
That first detection of the remnants of the Big Bang was crude, but a series of increasingly sophisticated instruments, culminating in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite in 2003, have laid bare the structure of the 400,000-year-old cosmos--only a few hundred-thousandths of its present age--in surprising detail. This was the baby picture Loeb referred to. At that point, the universe was still a very simple place. "You can summarize the initial conditions," says Loeb, "on a single sheet of paper." Some regions were a tiny bit denser than average and some a little...
...case, a light beam traveling through expanding space is stretched as well, its wavelength getting longer as it goes. Long-wavelength light is red; stretch it out longer and it becomes infrared light and then microwaves and, finally, long-wavelength radio waves. The flash that came from the Big Bang started out as visible light; by now, 13.7 billion years later, it's still streaming through space, but it has been stretched so much that astronomers have to use microwave antennas to detect it. The earliest galaxies came after the Big Bang, so their light isn't quite...