TRACKING DOWN THE FIRST STARS
Imagine a universe that is pitch black in every direction you look. True nothingness. Even if you open your eyes, the darkness doesn’t change. This was the universe 100 million years after the Big Bang, an era known as the ‘Dark Ages’. After the initial 'explosion' of the Big Bang, universal expansion caused the environment to go from scorching hot to a larger, cooler field of particles. As the cosmos continued to grow and cool, energetic particles began to settle down and form the first hydrogen particles, consisting of a proton and an electron, along with helium, which is made up of two neutrons, two protons and two electrons.
From this sea of hydrogen and helium molecules – with a sprinkling of lithium molecules – uniformly distributed clumps began to emerge as gravity played its valuable part in the cosmos. The same gravity that keeps our feet on the ground created balls of hydrogen atoms that continued to grow, and the density increased. In the next 10 to 100 million years the balls grew bigger and
