Astroboffins spy the brightest quasar that lit the universe's dark ages Scientists have spotted the brightest ancient quasar formed when the universe was less than billion years old, according to research published in The Astrophysical Journal. The newly discovered quasar, known by its not very catchy name PSO J352.4034-15.3373 or P352-15, also shoots out huge jets of plasma that appear extremely …
You don't think that if humans still exist in 700 million years they couldn't easily work around this? Heck if it was going to happen in 70 years instead of 700 million I'd be pretty confident we could do so - we'd basically just need to block some of the excess sunlight from reaching the Earth.
13 billion years for the light to reach us, 13.7 billion since the big bang, and 800 million since "particles started clumping together to form the first elements"...
If the light has been traveling 13 billion years, then the supermassive black hole and its burning accretion disc was around 0.7 billion years after the big bang... 100 million years before matter started clumping together...
Either someone's being mis-quoted, source data is wrong, my maths (most likely), or this was some sort of primordial black hole that was created during the big bang and this quasar pre-dates the formation of elements?
... or somebody is rounding to the nearest billion.
We don't have precise data on the age of the universe, either. It could be a bit older than we think, simply because the first stars might be so far away that due to the speed of light we cannot observe them yet.
We don't have precise data on the age of the universe, either. It could be a bit older than we think, simply because the first stars might be so far away that due to the speed of light we cannot observe them yet.
Or we cannot observe them because we've already missed our opportunity.
A consequence of the accelerating expansion of the universe is that everything is getting further away from us (and therefore dimmer). In the fullness of time, we will not even be able to observe anything outside our own galaxy. Even the Cosmic Microwave Background will be redshifted down to longer wavelengths and absorbed by the interstellar medium, leaving us truly alone in an entirely dark universe.
The universe [...]started as a hot soupy mixture of particles that started cooling as it began expanding.
Yup.
After 800 million years after the Big Bang, the particles clumped together to form the first elements and the first stars and galaxies.
Well, the particles had formed into simple elements a long time before that, but sure, it's thought the very first stars probably began to form starting about 150 million years after the BB.
But before then, there was no light.
Either sort of true or profoundly wrong depending on how pedantic you want to be about the definition of 'light' but certainly there weren't many objects around emitting the kind of visible light we see in the night sky of today's wonderfully named Stelliferous Era.
Summary at the Wikipedia Chronology Of The Universe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
Could change of course – wasn't so long ago we thought The Universe was considerably older than 13 billion years – and then there's the whole dark matter thing, which is still a fairly new idea – and no one knows what dark matter is yet – and now there's dark energy too, which is an even newer idea, and no one knows what that is either.
I think some source data is in error.
The cosmic dawn (when stars first lit up the heavens) is now thought to have begun about 180 million years after the Big Bang:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02616-8
So, it is likely that atoms clumping together was happening before this, leading eventually to the 1st generation of stars.
Shouldn't that be "shot", past tense?
Possibly both. Language doesn't work well with these time scales. What is being observed today took place long in the past, but at the core of the quasar is a black hole that is still in existence today. If there is any gas around for it to play with, then it probably is still blowing plasma like there's no tomorrow... but maybe it took up knitting instead. It is getting quite up there in age after all.
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