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Thread: Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe’s First Light

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    Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe’s First Light

    The latest in astrophysics.

    Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe’s First Light

    Not long after the Big Bang, all went dark. The hydrogen gas that pervaded the early universe would have snuffed out the light of the universe’s first stars and galaxies. For hundreds of millions of years, even a galaxy’s worth of stars — or unthinkably bright beacons such as those created by supermassive black holes — would have been rendered all but invisible.

    Eventually this fog burned off as high-energy ultraviolet light broke the atoms apart in a process called reionization. But the questions of exactly how this happened — which celestial objects powered the process and how many of them were needed — have consumed astronomers for decades.

    Now, in a series of studies, researchers have looked further into the early universe than ever before. They’ve used galaxies and dark matter as a giant cosmic lens to see some of the earliest galaxies known, illuminating how these galaxies could have dissipated the cosmic fog. In addition, an international team of astronomers has found dozens of supermassive black holes — each with the mass of millions of suns — lighting up the early universe. Another team has found evidence that supermassive black holes existed hundreds of millions of years before anyone thought possible. The new discoveries should make clear just how much black holes contributed to the reionization of the universe, even as they’ve opened up questions as to how such supermassive black holes were able to form so early in the universe’s history.



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    Crepitus (05-23-2017),Don (05-23-2017),Peter1469 (05-23-2017)

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    Those early super massive "black holes" are responsible for the galaxies around them. I think with the help of technology and smart people with focused minds we are on the verge of realizing that at this point we have no idea what the "universe" is at all and we won't be bothered about that at all. It wasn't that long ago that we thought our galaxy was the universe.


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    Peter1469 (05-23-2017)

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    The more we learn the less we know.

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    The more we learn, the more we realize how little we know. I would much rather it be that way than believing we are the center of the "universe" and it all revolves around us. The search into the micro world is just as interesting as the macro. We are starting to get a lot of data from the Jupiter probe, Juno, that made it there on July 4, 2016 and the theories are starting to pour out. They speculate that deep down in its atmosphere there is a substance so dense that when it condenses it rains down as diamonds. Below that is literally liquid diamond. Then further on down at the surface there might be an ocean in the form of liquid hydrogen and below that a core of solid hydrogen and helium under pressures so great that it can't be recreated in a lab and puts out a magnetic shield stronger than all the other planets combined and second only to our star. If there had been more gaseous material available when our solar system formed Jupiter most likely would have been a companion star in a binary star system. Luckily for us that didn't happen.
    Last edited by Don; 05-23-2017 at 08:59 PM.


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    Chris (05-23-2017)

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    Very well said.

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