Astrophysicist seeks missing "pages" of universe
Interview with Avi Loeb: Flipping through the "photo album" of the cosmos
Here’s Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University.
Avi Loeb: Basically, we know what the universe looked like as an infant, and we also know what it looked like as an adult, more than a billion years after the Big Bang. But we are missing some pages, between half a million years and a billion years. We haven’t yet imaged, we haven’t seen the universe in this intermediate epoch. And it’s very important, because that’s the time when an infant grows and becomes an adult.
Loeb said if we want to know how the big galaxies, like our Milky Way galaxy, formed – how the first stars formed – and when was the first light produced – astronomers need images of this very early epoch.
Loeb thinks this information is important to people, and always has been.
Avi Loeb: If you look at the ancient texts that survived for thousands of years, for example, the Bible, what do you find in the opening chapter? You find a discussion of how the universe was created, how the first light was produced in it, and so forth. So people were curious about these questions, from very ancient times, and what we’re trying to do today is address these questions with scientific means, we’re trying to use observations with telescopes, and other types of instruments to image the universe and get a better understanding of how everything started.
Our thanks today to Research Corporation, a foundation for the advancement of science.
Our thanks to:
Avi Loeb
Collection of deep space images from Hubble Space Telescope. These particular images are from 2004. At the time they were released, they were called “the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind.” They are part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) project. Extremely long exposures made with the Hubble Telescope revealed the first galaxies to emerge from the so–called “dark ages,” a time shortly after the Big Bang.
You can hear more from Avi Loeb of Harvard. Read the Earth & Sky interview with Avi Loeb.
