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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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: How the Stars Were Born | 8/27/2006 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: How the Stars Were Born | 8/27/2006 | See Source »

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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: How the Stars Were Born | 8/27/2006 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: How the Stars Were Born | 8/27/2006 | See Source »

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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: How the Stars Were Born | 8/27/2006 | See Source »

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