A new study has provided images of irregularities in relic microwave radiation. They correspond to the dense gas clouds that existed before the first stars erupted. The last stars came from them.
First light of the Universe
Researchers working with the Atacama Cosmological Telescope (ACT) in Chile have published a study in which they were not only able to demonstrate the presence of irregularities in cosmic microwave radiation, but also linked them to the first stars and Galaxies.
At the very beginning of its existence, the Universe was most likely homogeneous. But most of history there were galaxies and their clusters, which violated this homogeneity at least on a local level. And scientists have long suspected that these irregularities in the distribution of mass occurred before the first stars erupted.
It is true that it has been extremely difficult to establish this precisely until now. For the first few hundred thousand years, space was filled with dense clouds of hydrogen. Therefore, even the light of those stars that erupted first could not penetrate through them.
The first light that scientists see is background microwave radiation, also called relic light. It was born about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and if we can look anywhere for answers about the nature of the Universe in the beginning, it’s in it.
Light of the first stars
It was background microwave radiation that was studied by a group of scientists who published a new study. They did it for a long 5 years, and in fact all that time was a kind of analog of a camera’s long exposure time in order to accumulate more registered photons.
In this case, the observations were made in the polarized microwave range. That is, the electromagnetic oscillations were not only frequent but also aligned in the same plane. Thanks to all this, scientists have managed to see irregularities in the cosmic microwave background.
Microwave radiation did not occur all at once. For a while, the light from the newborn stars pushed its way through the clouds of hydrogen, and this produced these irregularities in the structure. And they match very well with what researchers see in newborn galaxies.
In addition, the new study has expanded the scope of our Universe. It has become clear that it extends in all directions for at least 50 billion light years.
According to phys.org
