Julian Muñoz has developed a ruler to measure the early universe.
Before the first stars, the universe was cold and dark — as Muñoz describes it, “boring.” Then, starlight began to reshape the universe. “It is a very dramatic epoch,” says Muñoz, of the University of Texas at Austin.
That epoch is also poorly understood. Cosmic dawn is so unexplored that Muñoz compares it to an uncharted area on early maps of Earth. There, Muñoz says, “there could be dragons.” By studying this era, he hopes to reveal the behavior of one dragon of the cosmos, dark matter, the inscrutable substance whose mass binds galaxies.
But to understand the cosmos, scientists have to be able to measure it. Looking far into space means looking deep into the past. “When we look at the night sky, we’ve got no depth perception,” says cosmologist Adrian Liu of McGill University in Montreal.
2023-06-27 07:00:00
Source from www.sciencenews.org