ASU cosmologist, collaborative group find radiation from first stars
Mar 3, 2018, 4:15 PM | Updated: 5:37 pm
(Nils Ribi Photography via AP)
(Nils Ribi Photography via AP)
PHOENIX — Cosmologists are always trying to learn more and more about the Big Bang and how the universe came to be.
Thanks to an Arizona State cosmologist and his collaboration, the Experiment to detect the Global Epoch of Deionization Signature, or EDGES, they may have gotten one step closer.
The group claims they have discovered a sign of radiation that originated from from the first generation of stars.
“Other than the cosmic microwave background radiation, this is the earliest observation of any kind in the universe,” Judd Bowman, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and the lead author of the research, told Inside Science Magazine.
“Compare it to Hubble looking at the first galaxies at 400 million years old; we’re looking at a time roughly half that age.”
The latest finding comes about 180 million years after the Big Bang.
These particular signs were formed when the first stars’ ultraviolet light reacted with free hydrogen gas, leaving key signatures in the radio spectrum that astronomers can use to help them learn more about the early moments of the universe.
Bowman and his collaboration are searching for a faint signal that can be tough to hear with all of the static noise coming from the Milky Way. But with the right calibration to the instruments used in the study, they are confident their measurement of the signal is linked to the past.
While the existence of the signal isn’t a surprise to Bowman, the low frequency is.
“If this impressive measurement is indeed confirmed, then it says that something weird is going on,” Rennan Barkana, an astrophysicist at Tel Aviv University said to Inside Science.
“The whole question of how dark matter interacts is wide open, and there haven’t been many observational clues yet, so I would be open-minded.”
Barkana said that something “surprising” had to have taken place. One of the possible explanations for the strong signal Bowman and the EDGES team discovered relates to more background radiation being absorbed instead of hydrogen gas being at a lower temperature.
However, the measurement by Bowman doesn’t distinguish this possibility.
Astronomers are inching closer to knowing what happened to stars and dark matter during the Big Bang, but are still a few years away.
