There are still many thing that we do not understand about the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang , and one special observation that is miss is seeing the first star topology . We have some idea of what they might be like but as of yet , we have n’t seen them directly .
They lived too far in the past times and pall too quickly . Our instruments are not yet good enough to spot them . In the meantime , however , we are improve how to spot them indirectly . The Murchinson Widefield Array , a radio observatory in Australia , has examine a 10 - fold improvement on the data point from the other universe of discourse . This improvement is describe in a newspaper publisher currently available to read on the preprint serverArXiv , soon to be publish in The Astrophysical Journal .
The observatory was designed with one goal in mind : to study the Epoch of Reionization ( EoR ) . This is the period when the establishment of first stars happened , named after what happened to hydrogen during this time .
About 380,000 class after the Big Bang , the existence was at last nerveless enough for the proton and electron to mold hydrogen atoms . Over hundreds of trillion of year ( the so - visit cosmic dark-skinned age ) , H gathered in clouds until it eventually collapse into the first stars . The light of the first stars was so vivid that it discase the electrons from the hydrogen ( a process call ionization ) , for the second time in the history of the creation .
" delimit the evolution of the EoR is extremely important for our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology , " lead author Dr Nichole Barry , from the University of Melbourne , pronounce in astatement . " So far , though , no one has been capable to observe it . These results take us a lot close to that goal . "
The team is looking at a specific emission of indifferent H known as the 21 - centimetre line . The signal is difficult to capture as it is very weak and there are a lot of other galaxies and objects between its sources and us .
The team collected 21 hours of raw data from the observatory and applied novel technique to refine the analytic thinking . Part of the focus was to verify that possible sources of contamination ( including signals from Earth ) where detected and exclude with high truth . The result importantly improves what we get it on about this mysterious date of reference .
" We ca n’t really say that this theme gets us closer to on the dot date the commencement or finish of the EoR , but it does rule out some of the more extreme models , " added co - author Professor Cathryn Trott , from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Western Australia . " That it happened very rapidly is now reign out . That the conditions were very cold is now also ruled out . "
succeeding observatories will be able to examine the first generation of star well and aid answers the many mysteries left to solve . These first star are expect to be hundreds , if not thousand , of times the size of it of our Sun and when they go away supernova they may have even bring on the seeds for the supermassive smutty holes now found at the core of galaxies .
