AaS! 82: What awoke the cosmic dawn?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2018
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Were the dark ages really dark? What is a perturbation, and how did they grow in the early universe? When the first stars awoke, what happened? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to WCBE Radio for hosting the recording session, Greg Mobius for producing, and Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, Chief Scientist at COSI Science Center, and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I've repeated topics before, like bringing up little things and a nugget of an episode that I've |
| 0:12.8 | discussed fully in another episode, especially rich, complicated topics like the Big Bang or |
| 0:17.9 | black holes and so on and so forth. |
| 0:25.9 | But this is the first time that I've rebooted an entire show. |
| 0:33.6 | I first talked about this topic in episode six over three years ago, |
| 0:37.7 | practically the Dark Ages, and in about 10 minutes you'll find out that's a really clever joke. And I want to talk about the first stars again. And I'm going to take a different tack |
| 0:44.2 | than I did oh so long ago, because I'm teeing up an episode someday, don't hold your breath, |
| 0:51.9 | about the formation of the cosmic web and large scale |
| 0:54.8 | structure in our universe. And that's going to be a big deal because it's a topic that |
| 0:59.8 | I'm personally really fascinated by a topic that intersects my own research. And so, yeah, |
| 1:04.2 | I want to spend a lot of time on that. This is like the origin story for the large scale structure. |
| 1:12.4 | This is what happens before the main trilogy, the main events, the main action, the big set piece, blockbuster. |
| 1:20.8 | This is what happens before that. |
| 1:23.7 | So that when we get to that big episode, I can say, hey, listen to that Cosmic Dawn episode again. You're like, oh yeah, I remember. I remember we did all that cool stuff. We know |
| 1:31.1 | all the characters and their motivations and why they're doing what they're doing. We can jump |
| 1:35.0 | right into the action. In this, this episode centers around a very, very basic question. |
| 1:41.0 | I love basic questions and science because basic simple questions are how we |
| 1:45.6 | illuminate some really powerful stuff in nature. And in this case, it's when did the first stars |
| 1:50.8 | appear? The short answer is we're not entirely sure. The long answer is like the rest of the |
| 1:56.5 | episode. And the reason it's a long answer is that there is a huge gap in our cosmological knowledge here. |
| 2:06.4 | We do know, and this is a crazy statement to make, we do know that there is a time when no stars existed. |
| 2:15.3 | And we know that there is a time when stars do exist. We know based on the |
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