The First Star Hunting in the Universe

According to a growing theory, our universe has been around 14 billion years old. The story of our universe is told by the light of sky objects. The composition of the universe's story is recounted by planets, comets, asteroids, distant stars, galaxies and matter spread in the universe.

Light is a major source of information for scientists to uncover the history of the universe that was set up by Background Radiation, a fossil of light from a time when the universe was still very young, hot and dense. The time when the universe was only 380,000 years old since the Big Bang or the Big Bang.

Wahana Planck conducted a survey from 2009 to 2013 to relearn the universe's past. The goal is to see the difference in temperature in background radiation. From all his research, Planck found that Background Radiation has other clues related to cosmic history recorded in polarization.

The light is polarized when it vibrates in a certain direction. Presumably, this happens when photons bounce off of other particles. Initially, photons were exploded in a solid and hot particle soup when a universe that was then made up of electrons, protons, and nutinoes was only a few seconds old. Very dense early universe conditions cause electrons and photons to collide continuously. In the end, light in the early universe cannot move too far because it will collide with other electrons. As a result, the early universe looked very foggy.

But, as the universe expands and gets colder, photons and other particles then drift away from each other and the collisions that used to happen, are rarer. As a result, there are two things that may happen. First, the electrons and protons will band together to form neutral atoms and inseparable by the coming photons. And secondly, photons will have enough space to travel and no longer trapped in the cosmic fog.

When liberated, the light will begin its journey by bringing the story of its last encounter with electrons which is then recorded in polarization in the background radiation. Polarization in the background radiation also shows very small fluctuations from one place to another in the universe. One is the temperature fluctuation that represents the condition of the universe when light and matter are separated. This information is used by astronomers to know the age of the universe, the rate of expansion, and the composition of matter, dark matter and dark energy.

Polarization data from Planck gives a new answer to the question when the first star was born.

When background radiation began its journey, the universe was still very different at the time. And it took quite a while until the first star was formed.

Information from the polarization of background radiation obtained by Planck shows that the darkness in the universe ended about 550 million years after the Big Bang or 100 million years earlier than the pre-existing theory.

When viewed from the numbers, 100 million years for the scale of astronomy is indeed short especially when compared with the age of the universe is almost 14 billion years. But a period of 100 million years is not a short time span let alone associated with the earliest formation of the first star in the universe.

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