Special Collection

The Universe. A History.

What was it like when human beings transformed the Earth?

What was it like when humans first arose on planet Earth?

What was it like when mammals appeared and thrived?

What was it like when life on Earth became complex?

What was it like when oxygen killed almost all life on Earth?

What was it like when Venus and Mars both died?

What was it like when life first sprang forth on Earth?

What was it like when planet Earth first formed?

What was it like when the Sun was born?

What was it like when dark energy rose to prominence?

What was it like when the Milky Way grew up?

What was it like when the cosmic web formed?

What was it like when the first living worlds formed?

What was it like when the Universe formed the most stars?

What was it like when life first became possible?

What was it like when supermassive black holes arose?

What was it like when the cosmic dark ages ended?

What was it like when the first galaxies began to form?

What was it like when the first “polluted” stars formed?

What was it like when the very first stars died?

What was it like when the first stars began to shine?

What was it like when the first atoms formed?

What was it like when the first elements formed?

What was it like when the last antimatter disappeared?

What was it like when protons and neutrons formed?

What was it like when the Higgs gave particles mass?

What was it like when matter defeated antimatter?

What was it like when the Universe was at its hottest?

What was it like at the beginning of the Big Bang?

What was it like when cosmic inflation occurred?

Starts With A Bang — December 14, 2023

What was it like when no stars yet existed?

Atomic nuclei form in minutes. Atoms form in hundreds of thousands of years. But the “dark ages” rule thereafter, until stars finally form.

When it comes to our cosmic history, it’s incredible to realize how impactful the earliest moments were in creating the conditions that would allow for our very existence many billions of years later. The earliest stages we can say anything meaningful about actually occurred even prior to the start of the hot Big Bang. Cosmic inflation took place and then ended, seeding the Universe with quantum fluctuations and then giving rise to the hot Big Bang. The Universe cooled and expanded from its hottest, densest stages to produce more matter than antimatter, then stable protons and neutrons, then atomic nuclei, and eventually even neutral atoms, all amidst a background sea of radiation and neutrinos.

You might think that once neutral atoms form, the next step would be driven by gravitation: the formation of stars. But the timescales required to form them are immense compared to everything that came before. By the time just half-a-million years have passed, the Universe is dominated by matter, the radiation sea is cool enough that atoms cannot become ionized, and gravitation gets to work in earnest. Even with those ingredients, it will still take somewhere between 50 and 100 million years for even the very first star in the Universe to form. For all the time in between, the Universe experiences the darkest part of the era known as the cosmic dark ages. Here’s what it was like back then.

A Universe where electrons and protons are free and collide with photons, transitions to a neutral one that’s transparent to photons as the Universe expands and cools. Shown here is the ionized plasma (left) before the CMB is emitted, followed by the transition to a neutral Universe (right) that’s transparent to photons. It’s the spectacular two-photon transition in a hydrogen atom which enables the Universe to become neutral exactly as we observe it.

The formation of neutral atoms isn’t simply important for setting into place the building blocks of all the complex chemical structures that can arise from molecules, ions, and any combination of atoms bound together. It’s also very important for “freeing” the photons, or particles of light, left over from the hot Big Bang. When neutral atoms first formed, that marks the time when photons stopped scattering off of free electrons, since free electrons are only present when your atoms are ionized in the form of a plasma. Once all the neutral atoms form, radiation then simply travels in a straight line; with nothing to scatter off of, it simply moves at the speed of light.

This light, in terms of the number of photons that are present, vastly outnumbers the number of atoms in the Universe. The light now appears to come uniformly from all directions and in all locations. At the start of the cosmic dark ages, the temperature of this photon bath starts off at 2970.8 K, which would appear yellow-orange in color at that moment. Some regions are slightly hotter than others, reaching temperatures of up to 2971.0 K, while others are slightly cooler, at around 2970.6 K. Those minuscule differences might not seem like much, but it’s the most important factor in how our Universe will evolve and grow from this point forward.

The most comprehensive view of the cosmic microwave background, which is the oldest light observable in the Universe, shows us a snapshot of what the cosmos was like just 380,000 years after the onset of the hot Big Bang. While the blue regions appear colder than average and the red regions appear hotter than average, the reality is that the photons coming from all of these regions have the same amount of energy distributed among them. It’s only the difference in the depths of the gravitational potentials in which they find themselves that lead to an observed temperature difference.

Why do these tiny temperature differences matter? Because in every region of space, all of those photons, or particles of light, actually both have the same amount of inherent energy and also have that energy distributed in the same fashion among all the photons present. The radiation, intrinsically, actually carries the same amount of energy in the hot regions as it does in the cold regions to start with, but the environment in which that radiation lives varies slightly from location to location. Some regions have exactly the average density that the overall Universe does, but other regions have slightly more (or less) matter than average.

The underdense regions, since they have less matter in them, have less gravity in them. When a photon travels out of that region, it has a smaller gravitational potential to fight against, meaning it loses less energy due to gravitational redshift, creating a photon temperature that appears hotter than average.

On the other hand, the overdense regions have more matter in them, and therefore, they have more gravity to fight against. As the photons climb out, they lose more energy than average, and therefore the photons emerging from those regions become colder, or less energetic, overall.

Regions of space that are slightly denser than average will create larger gravitational potential wells to climb out of, meaning the light arising from those regions appears colder by the time it arrives at our eyes. Vice versa, underdense regions will look like hot spots, while regions with perfectly average density will have perfectly average temperatures.

If you have a Universe with regions that are:

• of average density,
• of greater-than-average density,
• and of below-average density,

you might think that all that’s left to do is for these overdense regions to clump together and attract more and more matter, as gravity dictates, until we form stars. That’s part of the story, but it turns out that’s not the only factor at play. The photons, as a part of the Universe, have a little more to add to the story before they simply fade into the cosmic background.

The way gravity works is similar to how you might intuit it in your mind: all the masses attract one another, and wherever you have the most mass, it preferentially pulls in all the other mass around it. Even in the expanding Universe, these overdense regions attract mass from any nearby region that’s less dense, particularly from the underdense regions, which can only tenuously hold onto their matter, at best.

The density fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide the seeds for modern cosmic structure to form, including stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, filaments, and large-scale cosmic voids. But the CMB itself cannot be seen until the Universe forms neutral atoms out of its ions and electrons, which takes hundreds of thousands of years, and the stars won’t form for even longer: 50-to-100 million years.

What this teaches us is that gravity, in this sense, is a runaway force. In terms of drawing mass into a region, there are going to be “winners” and “losers” in this Universe, and the regions that have the largest head starts are the ones that wind up with the most matter in the end. As more and more matter gets attracted into a region, the more successful gravity then becomes at bringing even more additional matter into it.

However, this isn’t the full story. As true as this is, matter and gravity aren’t the only major presences in the Universe in action at this time. There’s also radiation, in the form of this leftover background of photons. And while matter — both dark matter and atomic matter — gravitationally attracts massive particles, it draws all forms of energy, including radiation, into the most overdense regions.

When this occurs, we have to remember that radiation, unlike matter, has a significant amount of pressure inherent to it. Our Sun, for example, has 300,000 times the mass of Earth, but is less dense than our own planet, and the reason for that is the tremendous outward pressure exerted by photons inside of it. The same type of pressure that holds a star like our Sun up against gravitational collapse also can hold up these collapsing gas clouds before any stars have formed, slowing the rate at which they grow. Even in a matter-dominated Universe, so long as radiation is still important, the matter overdensities can only grow very slowly.

Over time, gravitational interactions will turn a mostly uniform, equal-density Universe into one with large concentrations of matter and huge voids separating them. For as long as radiation is still important, exerting an outward pressure even once the Universe becomes matter-dominated, the growth of matter imperfections is very small.

For millions of years, the rate of growth of all these types of cosmic structure, driven by gravity, is severely limited. Radiation pressure simply will not allow the matter density to grow any faster than at a certain specific rate. Because we have millions of years that need to pass while the matter density grows and grows, even in the densest regions, another process begins to take place: something inherent to the most common type of atom in the Universe: hydrogen. Ever since we’ve formed neutral atoms out of (mostly) protons and electrons, there’s a new form of light that gets emitted: the light from the spin-flip transition within hydrogen atoms.

During these dark ages, 92% of the atoms in the Universe are simple hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms are made out of one proton and one electron, and both protons and electrons possess an intrinsic spin to them: either +½ or -½. There is a slight difference in the overall energy between a system where the proton and electron have the same spin (either +½, +½ or -½, -½), making it slightly higher-in-energy than where they have opposite spins (either +½, -½ or -½, +½). On timescales of around 10 million years, the configurations where they have the same spin will spontaneously flip, emitting a photon of a specific wavelength, 21 cm, when that happens.

When a hydrogen atom forms, it has equal probability of having the electron’s and proton’s spins be aligned and anti-aligned. If they’re anti-aligned, no further transitions will occur, but if they’re aligned, they can quantum tunnel into that lower energy state, emitting a photon of a very specific wavelength (21 cm) on very specific, and rather long, timescales. The precision of this transition has been measured to better than 1-part-in-a-trillion, and has not varied over the many decades it’s been known. It is the first light emitted in the Universe after the formation of neutral atoms: even before the formation of the first stars, but also thereafter: whenever new stars are formed, ultraviolet emission ionizes hydrogen atoms, creating this signature once again when those atoms spontaneously re-form.

Although the radiation present in the Universe is primarily driven by the leftover photons from the Big Bang, which today is observable as the cosmic microwave background radiation, there’s now another signal that gets added atop that one: this weak, tiny signal from the 21 cm emission line. If 92% of the atoms in the Universe are these simple hydrogen atoms, and there’s a 50/50 chance of protons and electrons having initially aligned or anti-aligned spins when they make these atoms, then that means there should be a 21 cm emission signal emerging from approximately 46% (by number) of all the atoms in the Universe.

Every hydrogen atom that spontaneously forms in a state where the protons and electrons are aligned will emit light in this fashion, and will do so every time new hydrogen atoms are made, including from previously neutral hydrogen atoms that were then ionized again. Although we have yet to detect the 21 cm emission signal emerging from the very first atoms formed in the Universe, it’s a signal that we know how to predict, and that a sufficiently advanced radio telescope should be able to detect if enough observing time is dedicated to uncovering it.

On the left, the infrared light from the end of the Universe’s dark ages is shown, with the (foreground) stars subtracted out. 21 cm astronomy will be able to probe epochs in the Universe’s history even farther back than the formation of the first stars, but sufficiently advanced observatories have not come around to rise to this challenge.

But there are other processes happening simultaneously that will be even more important for the cosmic story that’s only just beginning to unfold. While it’s true that the normal matter in our Universe — the stuff that makes up all the stars, planets, and all of the chemical reactions that will ever occur — is arguably, from a human-centric point of view, the most important component of our reality, there’s a lot more than just this normal matter within the Universe we know. The first step toward the creation of those entities will be the formation of the first stars, but we’ve still got a long way to go to get there from the moment we form neutral atoms.

We need help in order to get there: the help of photons redshifting, the help of gravitation pulling matter into the overdense clumps, and the help of time for both of these effects to build up to have substantial impacts. Over the first 3 million years after neutral atoms form, the temperature cools from ~3000 K to 800 K, taking the radiation from yellow-orange to orange to red colors, after which it finally cools enough to become invisible to human eyes. The falling radiation pressure allows matter clumps to grow, but only to about four times the magnitude that they were when the CMB was emitted.

The overdense regions that the Universe was born with grow and grow over time, but are limited in their growth by the initial small magnitudes of the overdensities, the cosmic scale on which the overdensities are found (and the time it takes the gravitational force to traverse them), and also by the presence of radiation that’s still energetic, which prevents structure from growing any faster. It takes tens-to-hundreds of millions of years to form the first stars; small-scale clumps of matter exist long before that, however. Until stars form, the atoms in these clumps remain neutral, requiring ionizing, ultraviolet photons to render them transparent to visible light.

By the time the Universe is between 15 and 20 million years old, it’s cooled to around the temperatures we experience here on Earth: empty space is about room temperature. The matter clumps that were just a little bit denser than average (maybe 1-part-in-30,000) have grown in amplitude significantly, and are now approximately 10-15 parts in 30,000 denser than the cosmic average. The densest clumps have started to grow somewhat more rapidly, and may be up to 60-to-90 parts in 30,000 denser than average: about 0.2% or 0.3% denser than a typical region of space.

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It’s very important to keep track of how dense these overdense regions get, because there’s a critical density that matter can reach where the simplest explanation for how these clumps grow no longer applies. Up until that point, in what’s known as the linear regime of structure formation, the overdense regions grow as though they follow a straightforward law: when the Universe is half the temperature, the matter clumps grow to double their original overdensity. Once you pass a certain, critical threshold, the clumps start growing much more quickly, in what we call a nonlinear fashion.

That critical transition happens once a region becomes about 68% denser than average. After that point, runaway collapse becomes inevitable.

The first stars and galaxies in the Universe will be surrounded by neutral atoms of (mostly) hydrogen gas, which absorbs the starlight. Without metals to cool them down or radiate energy away, only large-mass clumps in the heaviest-mass regions can form stars. The very first star will likely form at 50-to-100 million years of age, based on our best theories of structure formation.

So when does this first happen? At some point when the Universe achieves about 50 million years of age (perhaps a little bit more), the densest clumps have now transitioned into this post-critical phase, and start contracting and drawing additional matter in at an extremely accelerated rate. This will rapidly lead to the formation of the first stars in the absolute densest regions of space, but most of the rest of the Universe will continue only growing slowly, requiring more time for the matter clumps to grow to densities where star formation is possible.

The first big waves of star formation, on large cosmic scales, won’t begin until the Universe is around 200-250 million years old. However, within the very densest regions, the matter within them collapses down to large densities in just 50-to-100 million years. At some point, due to cooling, the very first star — defined by the first hydrogen-into-helium chain reaction via proton-proton fusion — will occur. In a Universe filled with dark matter and normal matter, the Universe must cool to somewhere around 100 K before the first true star can actually form.

Schematic diagram of the Universe’s history, highlighting reionization. Before stars or galaxies formed, the Universe was full of light-blocking, neutral atoms. While most of the Universe doesn’t become reionized until 550 million years afterward, with the first major waves happening at around 250 million years, a few fortunate stars may form just 50-to-100 million years after the Big Bang.

Conditions, just before the first stars formed, were significantly different to how they are today. Space wasn’t transparent to light, but rather was filled with neutral, light-blocking atoms. The leftover glow from the Big Bang, today’s CMB, was about 30-to-50 times hotter than it is now back then. And these conditions, within the expanding Universe, occurred so long ago that even with its powerful infrared capabilities, even JWST cannot observe them. Even though many hope that JWST will enable us to directly view those first major waves of star formation, the very first stars of all should remain obscure even to its unprecedentedly powerful eyes.

It takes under half a million years to take all the normal matter in the Universe and to complete the formation of neutral atoms, but 100-to-200 times as long before that neutral matter can collapse down enough to form even the very first star in the Universe. Until that happens, the only light to see will be the leftover glow from the Big Bang, which falls to low enough energies to make it invisible to what human eyes would see after just 3 million years. For the next 47-to-97 million years to follow, the entire Universe is truly dark.

But once the first star ignites, “let there be light” will finally, once again, become a part of our cosmic history.