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posted by mrpg on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the can-it-cook-my-popcorn dept.

The Experiment to Detect Global EoR Signature (EDGES) has found evidence of the universe's first stars by detecting an absorption feature at 78 MHz (redshifted from 1.42 GHz). In a second paper, the astronomers say that "this absorption can be explained by the combination of radiation from the first stars and excess cooling of the cosmic gas induced by its interaction with dark matter":

Using a deceptively simple antenna roughly the size and shape of a dinner table, radio astronomers have made an unprecedented discovery: telltale fingerprints from the earliest stars in the cosmos, pressed into the afterglow of the universe's birth. That signal, imprinted more deeply into the Big Bang's afterglow than scientists expected, could reveal much about the universe's youth and hint at the nature of dark matter, that mysterious substance that far outweighs all the normal matter in existence.

The findings [DOI: 10.1038/nature25792] [DX] and the theoretical work [DOI: 10.1038/nature25791] [DX] describing dark matter's potential role, described in two papers in the journal Nature, excited theoretical and experimental physicists alike.

"To my mind ... it's Nobel Prize-worthy twice, if it's real," said Avi Loeb, a Harvard University theoretical astrophysicist who was not involved in the research. "Not only did they detect the signal, but it actually is bigger than one can accommodate in the standard cosmological model. And you need new physics in order to explain a signal as big as they detected."

The first (short-lived) stars formed around 180 million years after the Big Bang.

Also at Ars Technica, Sky & Telescope, and The Verge.


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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:43PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:43PM (#645966) Journal

    "They (galaxies) are spinning so fast that they should centrifugally explode. Oddly, they don’t explode, so astronomers have had to invent invisible ‘dark’ matter and add it to the galaxies to hold them together with extra gravitational pull. This is a ‘patch’ since it is not predictive: you have to add dark matter 'by hand' to get agreement between standard gravity and the observed spin of the galaxy."
    --http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca/2014/01/mihsc-101.html

    It is as predictive as magic...better polish your wand some more.

    Dark matter is only needed if you believe Einstein is God: he is sacro sanct, unwrong, the truth in EVERY way.

    If you believe there are flaws in Einstein's theories (how come we don't see dishes unsmashing as often as we see them smashing, as Einstein says we should) than you may not need dark matter.
    I believe we are missing SOMETHING in his theories and dark matter is just a kludge to make Einstein a god again.

    And trust me, I believed he was almost a god: I did a speech on him for school when I was about 10 years old (and finally understood relativity after Tom Baker explained it on Doctor Who, lol).

    --
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