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Distant Stellar Explosion Helps Map Universe's Dark Ages

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-beginning dept.

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Near the beginning, the universe was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. That's because until about a billion years after the big bang, there were no galaxies or stars to illuminate the heavens, which were then filled primarily with neutral hydrogen gas. But a rare ultra–high-energy stellar explosion called a gamma ray burst has offered a new glimpse into this obscure period—the so-called cosmic dark ages—and may help nail down precisely when it ended. A new study of the explosion's afterglow suggests that such neutral hydrogen abounded a billion years after the big bang, so the dark ages weren't quite over then."

31 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by MrLogic17 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Since not everyone went to Sunday School, TFS is referencing Genesis chapter 1 verse 1.

    I'd read you the verse proper, but since verse 2 hasn't been quoted yet, it's too dark to read...

    1. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by gringer · · Score: 2

      Since not everyone went to Sunday School, TFS is referencing Genesis chapter 1 verse 1.

      I'd read you the verse proper, but since verse 2 hasn't been quoted yet, it's too dark to read...

      You have an off-by-one error. Verses in the bible don't begin at zero.

      --
      Ask me about repetitive DNA
    2. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Funny

      They did; until a Basic programmer (Satan) screwed up a copy loop.

      It's a central belief of 'The Church of Christ, Computer Programmer'. Can I get a Semicolon from the congregation?

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    3. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by MightyYar · · Score: 1

      Satan was obviously a Perl programmer, and he just shot a $[ = 1; at the beginning.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    4. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

      I don't think it was lost on anyone. It's funny because it was an incredibly accurate description of the beginning of time from a document thats nearly 4000 years old, before they even know what stars, time or space were. The concept of "Formless and Void" are incredibly advanced topics for the time period it was written in. We had no concept of "Void" at the time.

    5. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 1

      Of course we had a concept of "Void" at the time, it's written in at least one document from the time (Genesis). There wasn't a numeric symbol for zero, but that doesn't mean there was no concept of emptiness.

      --
      Not a sentence!
    6. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by DerekLyons · · Score: 1

      It's funny because it was an incredibly accurate description of the beginning of time from a document thats nearly 4000 years old, before they even know what stars, time or space were. The concept of "Formless and Void" are incredibly advanced topics for the time period it was written in. We had no concept of "Void" at the time.

      Well, 4000 years ago they didn't say "formless and void" they said "(something in a language that wasn't English)". They only said "formless and void" when the Bible was translated into English. On top of that, if they had no "concept of void"... how do you think they had a word for it in the first place?

    7. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by Cyberax · · Score: 1

      That might sound insightful, but it's not. It's just funny. The first verse means that the Earth was created before the first stars, which is not true. And even the second verse is not correct, as the first moments of the Universe's existence were so bright that it took millions of years for it to cool down to mere 'just hot enough to melt steel' temperature.

    8. Re:If you didn't ge the joke in TFS... by rgbatduke · · Score: 1

      ...and one could go on and on. Line by line, Genesis is pretty much nonsense, and isn't even particularly good poetry in places where it is poetic. Heaven and Earth first. Darkness on the face of the deep, where from the next sentence it is clear that the "deep" is the waters, that is, the ocean. Then light, which divides light from darkness, with light called day and dark night. Note well that there is still no sun, but there is day and night. Then he creates a "firmament" -- that would be a solid bowl -- to divide "the waters above from the waters below" and called it heaven. Then he causes the waters under the big bowl to collect so that dry land appears, leaving behind seas. Still no sun, but light and darkness, day and night. Then he covers the earth with grass and fruit trees. Only then, on day four does he actually get around to creating the stars -- and what is their purpose? To fill an enormous visible Universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars each? Oh, no, for signs and for seasons. God created the stars so he could use them as portents and so that we could tell when to plant. Afterwards, he finally gets around to creating two "lights", one greater and one lesser, the Sun and the Moon, to give light to the night and day. That is, Genesis doesn't even grasp that the Moon isn't a light at all, it is a passive reflector of sunlight, a big ball of rock, as opposed to the Sun, which is a star just like those lights that mark out the seasons. Then he created whales and birds and fish -- after land-based vegetation that managed without a sun, and only then did he create land animals ending with humans.

      So let's see, we've got a flat earth, a solid bowl of heaven hung with a tiny handful of stars to mark out the seasons, a completely wrong and absurd order of appearance of the living species and pretty much all of the matter in the Universe, and there isn't a hint of the possibility that the Earth itself isn't even a pimple on the backside of the Universe, it isn't even a single cell on a pimple on the backside of the Universe, it is a single atom in a single cell on the backside of the Universe (to scale).

      Then there is Genesis 2, which tells a completely distinct and different account of creation, where Adam was created before the animals and had to name them, one at a time (good luck with that, even today) as God created them and then had to beg for God to create a woman only after it became clear that all of the animals had females but he didn't. Note well that naming a species a second it still would have taken years to name even a reasonable fraction of them; not exactly the sort of thing that could possibly be finished in a day.

      Then there is Genesis 3, with the completely absurd story of God creating a tree with magical fruit that gives you knowledge of good and evil, telling the original couple not to eat any of the fruit, which they proceeded to do anyway because -- duh -- they didn't have a knowledge of good or evil so they had no way of knowing that what they were doing was wrong (where clearly, by the way, it wasn't), and then punishing them for doing what He had preordained from the beginning of time etc that they would do just so that God wouldn't die of boredom.

      It isn't, in fact, the case that Genesis is anything like a good metaphor for the scientific account of the big bang through the present, which in any event is not a creation as we have no evidence of "creation" ever happening anywhere in the sense that the Bible uses the term, ex nihilo. In fact, we have these lovely conservation laws that pretty much say "creation never happens", mostly because we never see it happening no matter where and how hard we look.

      Hinduism does much better, but even the Vedic creation myths and stories, treated as metaphor or not, are not a terribly good account of the scientific history.

      Finally, last time I read about (and taught) astronomy, the

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
  2. I don't understand something by mark-t · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the universe went through a dark period that was supposedly a billion years long, then why can we detect objects that are as far as 13.3 billion light years away? Shouldn't everything past about 12.8 billion light years be.... well... dark?

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    1. Re: I don't understand something by mark-t · · Score: 1

      Do you not see a contradiction there? If nothing older was producing any light, then where did the older light come from?

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    2. Re:I don't understand something by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

      why can we detect objects that are as far as 13.3 billion light years away?

      "...years ago", rather than "light years away," really. The light has taken 13.3 billion light years to get here, but the source was closer than 13.3 billion light years away when the light was emitted, and is further than 13.3 billion lights years now* (by about 3-4 times).

      *for a certain value of "now"

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    3. Re: I don't understand something by Bengie · · Score: 1

      He said "nothing in that period" produced any light, or very little. There was a time before the dark ages, but it was crazy high energy and short lived.

    4. Re:I don't understand something by mark-t · · Score: 1

      If the source was closer when the light we are seeing now was emitted, then we should be seeing it now at the distance it was at the time. The objects are, as we see them now on earth, over 13 billion light years away, which means that the light was emitted from them over 13 billion years ago. That doesn't sound particularly dark to me.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    5. Re:I don't understand something by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      The objects are, as we see them now on earth, over 13 billion light years away

      I'm not sure you should infer that from the article. All it says is (roughly) when the light was emitted; not how far away the object was at the time.

      The object could have been, say, 5 billion light years away at the time of emission, but the expansion of space means the light has taken 13 billion light years to get here.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    6. Re:I don't understand something by mark-t · · Score: 1

      If the object was 5 billion light years away at the time of emission, then it would take 5 billion light years for that light to reach us... not more... even though by the time the light reached us the object would be much further.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    7. Re: I don't understand something by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You do know that in astronomy and most of the science loving world we refer to anything on the EM spectrum as light?
       
      The summary is, at best, cumbersome to anyone who considers all forms of radiation as light. The CMB is happened roughly 380k years after the big bang and is considered to be the first and oldest light according to the generally excepted model of the universe today. Even prior to the CMB there was light but the universe was opaque and this light is lost.

    8. Re: I don't understand something by Bengie · · Score: 1

      There is a difference between producing new light and remitting old light. During the dark ages, there were no new light sources, only recycling of old light. That was the argument. Someone was saying there couldn't have been "the dark age" because CMB pre-dates it, which argued that there was light. Well, duh. We know there was light, be no new light was being created via stars.

    9. Re:I don't understand something by CheshireDragon · · Score: 2

      Spacetime is expanding at a very high rate. In that expansion the light emitted had a larger space to cross in order to get here. Therefor it would take longer for it get here than just the 5bn yrs. I been reading your comments and some of the folks here have been giving you great examples and explaining things perfectly. It is hard to grasp some of this if you are not a Physics/science major. Take a few entry level Physics classes, shit watch the new Cosmos show(or How the Universe Works is a great one) and it'll even put things in more basic terms to understand this. I am not being a dick by saying this. I said the same thing to my mother about 15yrs ago on taking a Computers 101 class so she could get the basic usage of a computer down and it worked wonders for her. This may very well help you understand this wonderful universe we live in. :)

      OH OH, there is also a lecture on YouTube, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, search for "My Favorite Universe" in youtube and it should bring it up. It's a 12 part series. He also has a more current one on Netflix. I can't remember the name at the moment, but it is 6 parts.

      --
      "That's right...I said it."
    10. Re: I don't understand something by rgbatduke · · Score: 1

      he universe was opaque and this light is lost.

      Not exactly lost, just thermalized. The mean free path of photons was simply short relative to cosmic distances, and gravity hadn't yet pulled enough hydrogen down into a gravitational well to ignite it, the distribution of matter was still fairly uniform except where it was gravitationally coalescing.

      Once the stars lit up, radiation pressure quickly enough swept their immediate vicinity clear and created "shockwaves" of moving stellar wind that nucleated lots more gravitational structure as it propagated. You can see this process continue today in star-forming regions of our own galaxy.

      But the light produced by the recombination era -- which was not all that short, or all that violent -- is what eventually became the CMB, "frozen out" once the universe's density dropped to where the mean free path of a photon reached "infinity".

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    11. Re:I don't understand something by mark-t · · Score: 1

      If something appears 5 billion light years away, then the light that you are seeing from that thing was emitted 5 billion years ago. If something appears to be 13.3 billion light years away, then the light that we are seeing from it was emitted 13.3 billion years ago... which is considerably earlier than the alleged dark period... ended. if things weren't really emitting any light before the dark age came to an end, then why can we detect them?

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    12. Re:I don't understand something by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      Article is wrong, there were some stars around in the first billion years.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  3. Cosmic Background Radiation by blue+trane · · Score: 2

    Doesn't the CMB indicate that re-ionisation occured much earlier, with the latest redshift being 7 which is well before a billion years since the Big Bang?

    The discrepancy between CMB measurements and quasar measurements of reionization is presented in Week 5 of Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe.

    1. Re:Cosmic Background Radiation by SpaceIsBig · · Score: 1

      At a redshift of 7 the universe is about 770 Myr old (with either Planck or WMAP 9 cosmology) which is close enough to 1 Gyr that you can say "about a billion years" (I guess it sounds better in a pop. science article).

      I have more of a problem with the line "there were no galaxies or stars to illuminate the heavens". They existed, it's just that the universe was opaque during this period.

  4. Re:Worlds highest minimum wage! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Entry level workers get a job at McDonald’s at 25 smackers an hour to start working.

    Trade school trained mechanic, after a few years in the field, is earning that or not much more. Not only does his hamburger shoot up to about 10-12 dollars for a combo, all costs for everything slowly rise like boats in a harbor with the incoming tide. He asks his boss for a raise, because he deserves more pay than some entry level laborer, and the cost of his companies business goes up. And now, the 25 dollar an hour worker at McDonalds is paying more to Mr. Trade School Mechanic to get their car worked on.

  5. dark for first 100 million years, not billion by rubycodez · · Score: 2

    first stars are 100 million years after big bang, by the time 1 billion years passed galaxies were everywhere

  6. Mod parent up by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 1

    Quite interesting.

  7. Re:Worlds highest minimum wage! by KingOfBLASH · · Score: 1

    Economics isn't that simple.

    For one, you might get some people who couldn't get a job as a McDonald's fry cook under normal circumstances who would be willing to work illegally for $10 an hour.

    Or McDonalds might now be able to justify the cost of an expensive robotic system, and no longer needs to employ fry cooks anymore (and the only guy working is an engineer who can fix them when they break, and he definitely should earn more than a trade school mechanic).

    Or, bosses won't give a rats ass about the fact that a fry cook is making as much as you, because you're still overpaid because of this minimum wage rule. (like how you could go get a nice cushy union position if you could find one that would pay $80 / hour but you just don't have the connections, and your boss doesn't care what the delivery guy is making)

    Seriously, economics is hard and because it follows non-linear behavior the results are non-linear (and difficult to predict)

  8. Distribution by dougg76 · · Score: 1

    Your reply does not account for the potential redistribution of wealth. Even if the cheap goods increase with price, it does not mean that the entire brunt of the cost increase will fall to its direct consumers. It might reduce the amount of money available to the speculators instead. Why do people have to talk so rude to each other instead of just making their point?

    --
    I laugh at inappropriate times.
  9. Re:OK by PPH · · Score: 1

    In the beginning, there was nothing.
    And God said, "Let there be Light."
    And there was still nothing, but you could see it.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  10. Re:Worlds highest minimum wage! by KingOfBLASH · · Score: 1

    As best I can tell, you didn't read my post and went on into a rant on a complete side issue.