Word: bangs
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...Bang...
...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...
...beginning . . . Half a million years after the Big Bang, the cosmos went dark. Two hundred million years later, baby galaxies began to shine. What happened in between laid the foundations for the modern universe...
...DARK AGES BEGIN When the cosmos was about 400,000 years old, it had cooled to about the temperature of the surface of the sun, allowing subatomic particles to combine for the first time into atoms. The last burst of light from the Big Bang shone forth at that time; it is still detectable today in the form of a faint whisper of microwaves streaming from all directions in space. The discovery of those microwaves in 1964 confirmed the existence of the Big Bang...