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Star bright, first light — fingerprint hunt

John Healy

[Galactic archaeology]

Following up on the “Ultimate how” question in the context of the Big Bang theory, how far back in time can we actually detect evidence, follow a breadcrumbs trail? To a cosmic dawn?

Space.com, among others, today posted articles about research at the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO), in particular the MRO’s Experiment to Detect the Global EoR Signature (EDGES) ground-based radio spectrometer.

Astronomers have picked up a long-sought signal from some of the universe’s first stars, determining that these pioneers were burning bright by just 180 million years after the Big Bang.

… the signal that Bowman and his team found was surprisingly strong. It was so strong, in fact, that it hints at a possible interaction between mysterious dark matter and the “normal” stuff that makes up the stars and you and me and everything else we can see in the universe.

The Big Bang theory characterizes the early universe as “suffused with neutral hydrogen atoms, which are good at blocking light.” So, early stars’ “ultraviolet radiation … would excite hydrogen atoms into a different state, causing them to absorb CMB photons” [rather than actually split these atoms].

Detection by the EDGES team required isolating a tiny variation (in this case a dip) within a broader radio spectrum, in this case the cosmic background radiation (CMB). The redshifted 21-cm line.1

“There is a great technical challenge to making this detection,” Peter Kurczynski, the NSF program director who oversaw funding for EDGES, said in a statement. “Sources of noise can be 10,000 times brighter than the signal. It’s like being in the middle of a hurricane and trying to hear the flap of a hummingbird’s wing.“

Confidence in identifying the correct variation then permitted a redshift calculation to estimate when those CMB photons were absorbed. Confirming the detection is the next step. Then once again the CMB as a “baby picture” of the early universe [an accidental discovery in 1964] can be “mined” for more information.

Astronomers with the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR (Epoch of Reionization) Signature (EDGES) project reported today (Feb. 28) that they’ve spotted the apparent fingerprints of the universe’s first stars. The signal they detected was twice as intense as they had predicted, suggesting that either the hydrogen gas pervading the early universe was significantly colder than expected, or background radiation levels were significantly hotter than light from the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the Big Bang that formed the universe.2

[1] It’s all in the lines, eh. Wiki:

The line [hydrogen line, 21-centimeter line or H I line] is of great interest in big bang cosmology because it is the only known way to probe the “dark ages” from recombination to reionization. Including the redshift, this line will be observed at frequencies from 200 MHz to about 9 MHz on Earth. It potentially has two applications. First, by mapping the intensity of redshifted 21 centimeter radiation it can, in principle, provide a very precise picture of the matter power spectrum in the period after recombination. Second, it can provide a picture of how the universe was reionized, as neutral hydrogen which has been ionized by radiation from stars or quasars will appear as holes in the 21 cm background.

[2] It’s all about temperature, detecting changes or patterns in the temperature of radiation — cooling and heating.

Gas in the early universe was already extremely cold — the coldest it would ever be, Barkana said, because it had cooled down from the universe’s hot early days but had not yet been heated by starlight.

The tiny amount of cooling is key to why this effect can be observed only in the early universe. With nothing else to heat the gas, it would quickly cool as it interacted with the dark matter, creating the unusual signal observed by the EDGES team. [Gallery: Dark Matter Throughout the Universe]

The signal the EDGES team spotted came from the absorption of cosmic microwave background photons by hydrogen gas. Barkana said it’s possible that something could be strange about the radio background rather than the gas.

“The measurement is solid, and it passed many checks,” he said. “But still, it’s important to get independent confirmation by a different instrument.”

8 thoughts on “Star bright, first light — fingerprint hunt”

  1. Here’s the link to the original Nature journal article, “An absorption profile centred at 78 megahertz in the sky-averaged spectrum.”

    Abstract

    After stars formed in the early Universe, their ultraviolet light is expected, eventually, to have penetrated the primordial hydrogen gas and altered the excitation state of its 21-centimetre hyperfine line. This alteration would cause the gas to absorb photons from the cosmic microwave background, producing a spectral distortion that should be observable today at radio frequencies of less than 200 megahertz. Here we report the detection of a flattened absorption profile in the sky-averaged radio spectrum, which is centred at a frequency of 78 megahertz and has a best-fitting full-width at half-maximum of 19 megahertz and an amplitude of 0.5 kelvin. The profile is largely consistent with expectations for the 21-centimetre signal induced by early stars; however, the best-fitting amplitude of the profile is more than a factor of two greater than the largest predictions. This discrepancy suggests that either the primordial gas was much colder than expected or the background radiation temperature was hotter than expected. Astrophysical phenomena (such as radiation from stars and stellar remnants) are unlikely to account for this discrepancy; of the proposed extensions to the standard model of cosmology and particle physics, only cooling of the gas as a result of interactions between dark matter and baryons seems to explain the observed amplitude. The low-frequency edge of the observed profile indicates that stars existed and had produced a background of Lyman-α photons by 180 million years after the Big Bang. The high-frequency edge indicates that the gas was heated to above the radiation temperature less than 100 million years later.

  2. After writing my blog post yesterday, I received a copy of Sean Carroll’s post on the topic, “Dark Matter and the Earliest Stars.” His post summarizes the detection well. It’s good to see commentary by a theoretical physicist who has written about physical cosmology.

    … any morsel of information we can scrounge up is very helpful in putting together a picture of how the universe evolved from a relatively smooth plasma to the lumpy riot of stars and galaxies we see today.

    … when stars first start shining, they can very gently excite the gas around them (the 21cm hyperfine transition, for you experts), which in turn can affect the wavelength of radiation that gets absorbed. This shows up as a tiny distortion in the spectrum of the CMB itself. It’s that distortion which has now been observed …

    … it’s a tour de force bit of observational cosmology …

  3. So, how far back in time can we actually detect evidence of a cosmic dawn? This Space.com article (May 16, 2018) “Stars Formed Only 250 Million Years After the Big Bang, a Step Closer to Cosmic Dawn” highlights research about “stars in a galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away [that] formed just 250 million years after the Big Bang.”

    In a galaxy far, far away — a galaxy called MACS1149-JD1 — stars formed earlier in the universe’s history than scientists can directly detect, according to new observations. Additionally, the same research revealed that MACS1149-JD1 is the most distant known source of oxygen and the most distant galaxy with a precise distance measurement, study co-author Nicolas Laporte, a researcher at University College London (UCL), told Space.com.

    … confirming the presence of oxygen in MACS1149-JD1 showed how an older generation of stars had already existed and died within the system. Although the researchers weren’t shocked to find oxygen, they were surprised at how early in the universe’s history this oxygen formed …

    Tags: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

  4. A time before stars … Paul Sutter tells the story of cosmic dawn in this recent Space.com article “How the ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Broke and the First Stars Formed” (August 22, 2018), which includes 2 video monologues.

    Take, for instance, the fact that at one time in the foggy, ill-remembered past, there were no stars.

    We know this simple fact because of the existence of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), … If you encounter a random photon (a bit of light), there’s a good chance it’s from the CMB — that light takes up more than 99.99 percent of all the radiation in the universe. It’s a leftover relic from when the universe was just 270,000 years old, and transitioned from a hot, roiling plasma into a neutral soup (with no positive or negative charge). That transition released white-hot radiation that, over the course of 13.8 billion years, cooled and stretched down into the microwaves, giving us the background light that we can detect today.

    The other way to unlock the cosmic dawn is through a surprising quirk of neutral hydrogen. When the quantum spins of the electron and proton randomly flip, the hydrogen emits radiation of a very specific wavelength: 21 centimeters.

    The trouble is that the universe has expanded since that long-dead era, which causes all intergalactic radiation to stretch out to longer wavelengths. Nowadays, that primordial neutral hydrogen signal has a wavelength of around 2 meters, placing the signal firmly in the radio bands. And many other things in the universe — supernovas, galactic magnetic fields, satellites — are quite loud at those same frequencies, obscuring the faint signal from the universe’s early years.

  5. Re the universe’s formative years: quasars … early black holes … infrared space telescopes … simulations …

    • Daily Galaxy > “‘Soon to be Revealed’ – Hidden Galaxies of the Early Universe” posted on Oct 15, 2020 in Astronomy, Astrophysics, Black Holes, Science, Universe

    “Hubble simply doesn’t go far enough into the infrared” to see the hidden galaxies of the early universe, said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, co-author of a new study using the near-infrared capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe known quasars, ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’, in hopes of spotting the surrounding glow of their host galaxies, without significant detections, suggesting that cocoons of dust that absorb visible light within the galaxies is obscuring the light of their stars.

    Webb will primarily look at the Universe in the infrared, while Hubble studies it primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths (though it has some infrared capability). Webb also has a much bigger mirror than Hubble, which means that Webb can peer farther back into time than Hubble is capable of doing. Hubble is in a very close orbit around the earth, while Webb will be 1.5 million kilometers distant at the second Lagrange (L2) point where the Webb’s solar shield will block the light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon.

  6. Another role for simulations …

    • Daily Galaxy > “‘Lost in the Mists of Time’ – The First Stars that Ultimately Led to Life in the Universe” posted on Oct 23, 2020 in Astronomy, Cosmology, Cosmos, Science, Universe

    The investigations are a part of a field called ‘galactic archaeology,’ where the character of long-gone stars can be revealed from their fossilized remains.

    “We can’t see the very first generations of stars [metal-free first stars],” said study co-author John Wise, an associate professor also at the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, School of Physics, Georgia Tech. “Therefore, it’s important to actually look at these living fossils from the early universe, because they have the fingerprints of the first stars all over them through the chemicals that were produced in the supernova from the first stars.”

  7. Another scale of galactic archaeology.

    • Cnet > “Telescope time machines solve age-old mystery of universe” by Monisha Ravisetti (Sept. 23, 2021) – Why did some galaxies from the early universe suddenly stop making stars? Astronomers looked back in time to find out.

    (quote) “The most massive galaxies in our universe formed incredibly early, just after the Big Bang happened,” Kate Whitaker, a professor of astronomy at University of Massachusetts-Amherst and lead author of a new study, said in a statement.

    It turns out, some old galaxies merely ran low on star fuel, or cold gas, early on in their lifetimes. The results of the group’s study were published Wednesday in the journal Nature and could rewrite our knowledge of how the universe evolved.

    … Whitaker and fellow researchers demystified the issue by using … the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA.

  8. How uniform is the CMB? Quite. Yet, there’re anomalies.

    How uniform – at largest scales – is mass distribution in the cosmos? Well, maybe that’s the thing. Voids.

    • Phys.org > “A step closer to understanding the ‘cold spot’ in the cosmic microwave background”

    Dark Energy Survey … dark energy & dark matter … cosmic web … Eridanus supervoid …

    • Phys.org > “A step closer to understanding the ‘cold spot’ in the cosmic microwave background” by Maxwell Bernstein, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (January 12, 2022)

    Among the largest structures known to humanity, the supervoid in the constellation Eridanus is a massive, elongated, cigar-shaped void in the cosmic web that’s 1.8 billion lightyears wide and has been observed to contain about 30% less matter than the surrounding galactic region. Its center is located 2 billion lightyears from Earth, making it the dominant underdensity of matter in our galactic neighborhood.

    (image caption) The Cold Spot resides in the constellation Eridanus in the southern galactic hemisphere. The inset shows the microwave temperature map of this patch of sky, as mapped by the European Space Agency Planck satellite. The main figure depicts the map of the dark matter distribution created by the Dark Energy Survey team. Credit: Gergö Kránicz and András Kovács

    Although the new result confirms that the Eridanus supervoid is gigantic, it still is not sufficient to explain the discrepancy between the predictions of the current standard cosmological model used to predict the behavior of dark energy – known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model – and the observed change in temperature in the Cold Spot that can be attributed to the supervoid’s effect on photons from the CMB.

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