Résumé / Abstract Seminaire_IAP
« The dark ages of the Universe: how our cosmos survived »

Piero Madau
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, California, Etats-Unis d'Amérique)

The Universe started with a bang 13.8 billion years ago, but the echoes of such a glorious beginning rapidly faded away. Following recombination and the formation of the first atoms, the early Universe was a nearly structureless primordial soup of dark matter and neutral hydrogen gas: there were no galaxies, stars, or planets. This was truly a cosmic "dark age", but things changed when slightly denser regions began to contract under the relentless pull of gravity. It took a few hundred million years, but eventually these dense regions gave birth to the first galaxies, stars, and black holes that lit up the cosmos again. How the Universe emerged from darkness to light remains a mystery, a science frontier discovery area that is barely probed by existing telescopes. Over the next decade, we expect this to change.
jeudi 22 février 2018 - 11:00
Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
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