Astrophysics rejuvenated 100 million years, the first stars in the Universe

said Italian astrophysicist Charles Baccigalupi (Carlo Baccigalupi) of the International school for advanced studies SISSA in Trieste (Italy).

Tonight, the European space Agency (ESA) has published on its website last portion of the data collected by the telescope “Planck” during observations of the “echo” of the Big Bang from 2009 to 2012. In addition to announced at the beginning of this week, evidence that the Arctic BICEP2 telescope and could not find gravitational waves, ESA has introduced new high quality maps of the CMB, and also revealed a few surprising discoveries.

The most notorious of them, according to most scientists, is that the so-called era of reionization - period of a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was gradually becoming transparent and available for observation - lasted significantly longer than previously thought.

By now generally accepted estimates obtained using the American probe WMAP in 2002, the “dark ages” of the Universe, as it is called this period astronomers, lasted about 450 million years. Scientific team “Plank” tried to Refine these estimates, using the fact that galaxies and stars visible way scriplet relic microwave radiation, twisting it in one direction or another.

This feature of the “echo” of the Big Bang at the same time allowed the scientists to simultaneously determine two things to understand when it really is over the age of reionization, and calculate the age of the first stars of the Universe.

As it turned out, reionization ended much later than thought astrophysics - over 550 million years after the Big Bang, which is 100 million more than previous estimates. The first light of the Universe came about at the same time. Scientists say that this is unexpected, but a positive result - if the stars for the first time would have appeared in an earlier era, their light would be insufficient to heat and ionize the gas clouds.

As a bonus, the astronomers were able to detect almost 1.5 thousand clusters earliest galaxies that emerged at the end of the “dark ages” of the Universe. According to calculations of the members of the research team, a lot of them in a hundred or even a thousand times was larger than our Galaxy, the milky Way.

The European space Observatory “Planck” (Planck), who worked in the millimeter and submillimeter range, was launched in may 2009. Its main task was to scan the whole celestial sphere in this range and to get the most complete picture of the CMB - “echo” of the Big Bang. The first scan session “Planck” was completed in July 2010, however, a full analysis of the data was completed only in the second half of 2014.