{"id":227372,"date":"2025-06-30T19:26:13","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T19:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/227372\/"},"modified":"2025-06-30T19:26:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T19:26:13","slug":"a-faint-signal-from-the-dawn-of-time-could-reveal-the-very-first-stars-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/227372\/","title":{"rendered":"A Faint Signal From The Dawn of Time Could Reveal The Very First Stars : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hints of the very first stars<\/a> to light the Universe might be discovered in a faint radio signal feebly beaming from the dawn of time.<\/p>\n

The cosmological 21-centimeter signal<\/a> emitted by the neutral hydrogen that filled the space between the stars just 100 million years after the Big Bang<\/a> could have been influenced in ways that encoded the properties of those stars.<\/p>\n

We’re not there \u2013 yet \u2013 but observations from a new generation of radio telescope facilities will allow astronomers to tease out the masses of these first stars, a crucial clue to understanding the evolution of the Universe, particularly in its difficult-to-see early epoch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“This is a unique opportunity to learn how the Universe’s first light<\/a> emerged from the darkness,” says astronomer Anastasia Fialkov<\/a> of the University of Cambridge and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in the UK. “The transition from a cold, dark Universe to one filled with stars is a story we’re only beginning to understand.”<\/p>\n

Related: <\/b>Signs of Monster Stars 10,000 Times Our Sun’s Mass Found at The Dawn of Time<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

In the beginning, there was darkness<\/a>. The tiny, but rapidly expanding, Universe was filled with a hot, dense fog of plasma consisting of small atomic nuclei and free electrons.<\/p>\n

As they cooled, these particles came together to form neutral hydrogen and a little bit of helium. But there weren’t a lot of stars around, so it stayed pretty dark for a while.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

It’s from this neutral gas that the first stars are thought to have formed, but, despite our best efforts, we’re yet to identify a star from that very first generation<\/a> of lights glittering in the darkness.<\/p>\n

Some astronomers believe that this is because the first stars were absolutely huge<\/a>, thousands of times the mass of the Sun, with incredibly short lives. Stars this massive would have lived and died in the blink of a cosmic eye.<\/p>\n

Such characteristics would make finding them extremely challenging, but they may have left other marks on the Universe. The cosmological 21-centimeter signal is one potential marker: the very, very faint radio light emitted by the interstellar neutral hydrogen in the early Universe as its electrons reversed their spins.<\/p>\n

Radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA<\/a>) under construction in Australia and South Africa and the Radio Experiment for the Analysis of Cosmic Hydrogen (REACH<\/a>) in South Africa will be powerful enough to observe this faint signal. When they do, new research has shown them what to look for to find evidence of the first stars.<\/p>\n

In a research effort led by astrophysicist Thomas Gessey-Jones of Cambridge and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, scientists modelled the 21-centimeter signal, and found that the first stars would have had a detectable, and measurable, effect on it.<\/p>\n

Not only that, the research showed what that effect would look like \u2013 so that, when the observations do come in, scientists will know what it is they have found.<\/p>\n

\"\"The ASKAP radio telescope in Wajarri Yamaji Country in Australia is a precursor facility for SKA. (\u00a9CSIRO\/A. Cherney<\/a>)<\/p>\n

“We are the first group to consistently model the dependence of the 21-centimeter signal of the masses of the first stars, including the impact of ultraviolet starlight and X-ray emissions from X-ray binaries produced when the first stars die,” Fialkov says<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“These insights are derived from simulations that integrate the primordial conditions of the Universe, such as the hydrogen-helium composition produced by the Big Bang.”<\/p>\n

When massive stars die<\/a>, their cores collapse under gravity and evolve into the densest objects in the Universe: neutron stars and black holes<\/a>. These extreme objects<\/a> produce powerful X-radiation<\/a> that can have a profound effect on material around it.<\/p>\n

The researchers say that previous work modeling the effect of the first stars on the 21-centimeter signal did not account for this X-radiation.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

The modeled results may not be exactly the same as the observed signal \u2013 but the work brings astronomers closer to finding it.<\/p>\n

“The predictions we are reporting have huge implications for our understanding of the nature of the very first stars in the Universe,” says astronomer Eloy de Lera Acedo<\/a> of Cambridge.<\/p>\n

“We show evidence that our radio telescopes can tell us details about the mass of those first stars and how these early lights may have been very different from today’s stars.”<\/p>\n

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hints of the very first stars to light the Universe might be discovered in a faint radio signal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[120,74,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-227372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-msft-content","9":"tag-physics","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114773962620456490","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}