Can We See the First Stars?
The tiny variations in the composition of the early universe caused by quantum fluctuations are believed to have resulted in the large-scale pattern of galaxies, galaxy clusters and voids that we see in the night sky today. A few hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, small excess concentrations of dark matter were drawn together by their gravity to form ‘halos’, which then merged. Ordinary matter – hydrogen and helium atoms – became concentrated at the centres of these halos, leading eventually to the birth of the first stars.
This is the fourth in a series of posts on the Oxford University Press TUMBLR site.
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