Astronomers open new window into early universe
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 14:32
in Astronomy & Space
Thirteen billion years ago our universe was dark. Eventually that mysterious time came to an end as the first stars ignited and their radiation transformed the nearby gas atoms into ions. Astronomers have developed a small-scale radio astronomy experiment designed to detect a never-before-seen signal from the early universe during this period of time, called the Epoch of Reionization, which is intimately linked to many fundamental questions in cosmology.