Cosmic dawn: first stars, galaxies and black holes

This text mentions work from 2024 on. Those parts were partly written without a live literature search and have not been checked by an editor yet.

Between about 100 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang the first stars, galaxies and black holes formed and their light ionized the hydrogen gas. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finds more bright galaxies and large black holes at these times than expected, and radio telescopes try to detect the 21-cm radio line of hydrogen from this era.

Why it matters

This epoch tests how fast cold dark matter halos turn gas into stars and black holes, and the 21-cm signal could expose new physics such as dark matter interactions.

Review

Adamo A. et al., The First Billion Years, According to JWST, arXiv, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.21054 reference checked

Timestamp record

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Public log
Entry 183, in checkpoint 2,123
In the log by
Block 969,698, 2026-10-03

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