Word: cosmos
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Until someone finds better evidence to the contrary, it's safe to assume that the very tiny galaxies filled with second-generation stars were by far the dominant type in the early cosmos. It would also have been safe to assume that nobody could spot them in their earliest incarnation without giant new telescopes--if not for Ellis. "He does like to push the frontiers," says theorist Norman with mixed amusement and respect. "It's always great fun to go to a meeting and see the latest Ellis most-distant-object sweepstakes entry...
...understatement. The first galaxies to emerge from the blackness of the early universe can't be studied in detail until telescope technology makes another great leap. But Ellis and Stark may have got a glimpse--and given theorists the first hard evidence--of that unimaginably distant time when the cosmos left infancy behind and entered the formative childhood that led, eventually, to our sun and the tiny blue planet that circles it. [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Illuminating a Dark Age How the universe grew from a murky soup to twinkling galaxies Looking...
...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...
...DARK MATTER Accounting for a bigger portion of matter than ordinary atoms, dark-matter particles were spread unevenly through the cosmos; areas of higher concentration drew in hydrogen and helium gas, gradually forming the first stars dense enough to burst into thermonuclear flame 3 FIRST STARS The earliest stars were massive, weighing in at 20 to more than 100 times the mass of the sun. The crushing pressures at their cores made them burn through their nuclear fuel in only a million years or so and caused them to spew radiation so intense that it kept other stars from forming...