Word: suns
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...great voids in between. Eventually, clouds of hydrogen became so dense that their cores ignited with the fires of thermonuclear reactions--the sustained hydrogen-bomb explosions, in essence, that we know as stars. But whereas the familiar stars of the Milky Way are mostly similar in mass to the sun, these first stars were, on average, gigantic--at least 25 times as massive as the sun and ranging as much as 100 times as massive, if not more. A star that big burns very hot, shining perhaps a million times brighter than the sun and generating a wind of particles...
...destroying their ability to block light. That process is known as reionization, and those stars, forming perhaps 100 million years into the Dark Ages, or roughly at the era's midpoint, might have rendered the universe transparent on their own if they had lived long enough. But unlike the sun, which has survived 5 billion years so far and should live another 5 billion, those stars lasted only a paltry million years. If the first stars formed 100 million years after the Dark Ages began, they were gone by 101 million years. As they died, the smaller of the stars...
...ultimately, human beings. At the time, though, they served simply to change the chemistry of the clouds, allowing them to collapse into far smaller objects than they could before. The second generation of stars, incorporating the ashes of the first, arose almost immediately. They were much more like the sun, in both composition and size. And like the sun, they would have started out generating lots of ultraviolet light before settling down to a more sedate existence...
...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 for the beginning of time...
...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...