epoch of reionisation – Astronomy Now

Monster black hole in early universe challenges theorists

25 June 2020 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have found a 1.5-billion-solar-mass black hole dating back to within 700 million years of the Big Bang birth of the cosmos.

Hubble spies brightest known quasar in the early universe

11 January 2019 Astronomy Now

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the brightest quasar ever seen in the early universe, an active galactic nucleus shining 11 trillion times brighter than the Sun.

Found: The most distant supermassive black hole ever observed

6 December 2017 Astronomy Now

A team of astronomers have discovered the most-distant supermassive black hole ever observed. It resides in a luminous quasar and its light reaches us from when the Universe was only 5 percent of its current age — just 690 million years after the Big Bang.

Distant galaxies ‘lift the veil’ on the end of the cosmic dark ages

14 July 2017 Astronomy Now

Astronomers studying the distant universe have found that small star-forming galaxies were abundant when the universe was only 800 million years old, a few percent of its present age. The results suggest that the earliest galaxies, which illuminated and ionized the universe, formed at even earlier times.

Ripples in cosmic web measured using rare double quasars

28 April 2017 Astronomy Now

Astronomers believe that matter in intergalactic space is distributed in a vast network of interconnected filamentary structures known as the cosmic web. Nearly all the atoms in the universe reside in this web, vestigial material left over from the Big Bang.

Preparing to study the Epoch of Reionisation

11 October 2016 Astronomy Now

The epoch when the very first stars appeared is a key period of cosmic history. These stars began the manufacture of the chemical elements (those heavier than hydrogen and helium) and their light began the reionisation of the neutral cosmic gas. These stars thus mark the dawn of the universe as we know it today and the start of the so-called Epoch of Reionisation.

First stars formed even later than previously thought

2 September 2016 Astronomy Now

ESA’s Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the universe had reached an age of 700 million years.