Book

When galaxies were born : the quest for cosmic dawn

Ellis, Richard S. (Richard Salisbury), 1950- author

Overview

\"Approximately 300,000 years after the Big Bang, all matter consisted of three chemical elements: hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium. This matter spread out as the universe expanded and cooled down, and from the far-flung gas clusters the first stars ignited. Eventually, due to gravitational clustering, primordial galaxies formed. The earliest galaxies, which evolved in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, contained stars that in turn contained only hydrogen and helium. These galaxies are thought to have produced copious amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which re-ionized the hydrogen in deep space and sparked one of the major phase transitions in the universe's early evolution, called the reionization era. In When Galaxies Were Born, Ellis describes efforts to reveal the oldest, most distant stars and galaxies in the universe and, in turn, to better understand the early evolution of the universe. Observational research into the largely uncharted cosmological era of \"cosmic dawn\" is notoriously difficult and involves such major space- and ground-based observatories as ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile, the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Hubble Space Telescope, and it will progress in the future using the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile, the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii, and the NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in mid-December 2021. While giving readers an inside look at the last several decades of progress in the field, Ellis also shares his own story and personal perspective, taking readers along as he uses observatories around the world to reveal how the first stars and galaxies came into being and how the earliest galaxies led to the further emergence of cosmic structure in the universe\"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: Galaxies Formation. / Cosmology. / Astronomy Observations. / SCIENCE / Space Science / General / SCIENCE / Space Science / Astronomy
• ISBN: 9780691211305

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Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
QB857 .E45 2022	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE