Book First Light Emma Chapman

First there was darkness.

For the first 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was dense and opaque. Eventually, it cooled enough that photons of light could travel freely through space, even though nothing in it had yet to shine. This period is called the cosmological Dark Ages. For hundreds of millions of years, clouds of rarefied gas gathered and compressed into glowing spheres in total darkness. And at some point, a thermonuclear reaction began in the depths of one of these spheres, the very first star ignited, and darkness gave way to light for the first time in history. This was the beginning of the cosmos as we see it today. It was a time when the chaos of the Big Bang gave way to order, opening the way to planets, comets, moons, and, eventually, life.

Emma Champen's book sheds light on these dark times, telling the story of the first stars, hundreds of times larger and millions of times brighter than the Sun, solitary giants that burned fiercely and died young in super-powerful explosions. The scientist explains how these stars formed, why they were so unusual, and what they can tell us about the modern universe. She also invites us to look at the huge new telescopes that will peer back in time for traces of such stars, and move this period in the history of the universe from theoretical physics to observational astronomy.

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