![]() ![]() Less than a million years later, electron-photon interactions became rare and the expanding Universe became increasingly transparent. Electrons and photons regularly snared each other in this period, which made the Universe opaque. Kashlinsky (GSFC).Ĭurrent models of cosmology tell us that shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe was filled with hot dense plasma. ![]() The Big Bang timeline of the Universe, showing when and in what wavelengths things became visible. Equipped with this vastly-improved data, the team is now searching through it all for telltale indicators of a radio signal that originated from the “Dark Ages.” Using data obtained by this array last year, an international team of researchers is scouring the most precise radio data to date from the early Universe in an attempt to see exactly when the cosmic “Dark Ages” ended.Īs they indicated in their study, which appeared in The Astrophysical Journal last year, the team had succeeded in filtering out ten times as much electromagnetic interference (compared to the norm) from more than 21 hours of data collected by the MWA. It’s for this reason that radio telescopes like the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) were built. However, astronomers have learned that light from this era can be detected as faint radio signals. Unfortunately, astronomers have been unable to “see” them since their emergence coincided during the cosmological period known as the “Dark Ages.” During this period, which ended about 13 billion years ago, clouds of gas filled the Universe that obscured visible and infrared light. According to the most widely accepted cosmological theories, the first stars in the Universe formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
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