|
First Stars III
Contact:
|
Talk
Title: The First Things in the Universe Presenter: Professor Tom Abel, Stanford University Abstract: Eighty years ago, Edwin Hubble showed that the Universe is expanding. Sixty years ago, we learned where all the hydrogen and helium in the Universe were made. About 40 years ago, we started observing radiation left over from the Big Bang itself. Over the last 20 years, weÕve come to understand that without dark matter, there would be no galaxies nor any of us. Armed with the most sensitive detectors and largest supercomputers, yet, we are learning what happened in the first billion years of the Universe's history. Theorists today predict the very first luminous object in the universe were isolated massive. These shaped their environments with the copious amounts of radiation they have emitted and the heavy elements thrown out in energetic supernovae. Quite a large number of your carbon and oxygen atoms in fact were made in these first hundreds of millions of years, some 13.5 billion years ago.
|
