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The Universe Evolves in Radio
Today’s news focuses on the history of our universe’s star formation. This is one more instance of astronomers finding novel ways to do science initially planned for JWST using other instruments on and above our world.
Massive stars put out the bulk of their light in the ultraviolet, and our universe’s expansion stretches this light out, pushing it through the visible light spectrum and all the way out to the infrared and radio. If successfully launched, JWST will be able to detect this early light, but today astronomers are turning to ground-based radio dishes to get at a start at this early universe science.
Our big picture understanding describes a universe where star formation started a few hundred thousand to a million years after the Big Bang, with the first galaxies appearing to be established a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The universe continues to evolve, lighting up as galaxies quickly evolve toward well-established morphologies with peak star-formation occurring 2–5 Billion years after the Big Bang. In our universe’s more than 13 Billion year history, the structures established in those early eons formed the gravitational foundations around which everything we see today has gathered.
While we had seen hints of the most massive of these early structures with radio and infrared telescopes, we haven’t been able to…
