Word: cosmos
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...astronomer likes to be cheated out of an observing night, whether the quarry is a mundane moon of Jupiter or an exotic quasar halfway across the cosmos. But Ellis has special cause for frustration: he's looking for something far more elusive than any quasar. Tonight he intended to bag something most astronomers consider next to impossible: the most distant galaxy ever seen--and not the farthest by just a little bit. The current record for distance, held by another giant Mauna Kea observatory, Japan's Subaru telescope, is for a galaxy whose light started its journey to Earth...
...like that would give Ellis bragging rights at astronomy conferences for years to come, and it would let Stark finish his dissertation with a dramatic flourish. But far 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...
When the Dark Ages began, the cosmos was a formless sea of particles; by the time it ended, just a couple hundred million years later, the universe was alight with young stars gathered into nascent galaxies. It was during the Dark Ages that the chemical elements we know so well--carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and most of the rest--were first forged out of primordial hydrogen and helium. And it was during this time that the great structures of the modern universe--superclusters of thousands of galaxies stretching across millions of light-years--began to assemble...
...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...
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...