More than 100 million years has been wiped off the age of the first stars but there is still the question of what happened in the first billion years of the universe.
Earlier this month the European Space Agency’s Planck mission team announced that the first stars formed some 560 million years after the Big Bang.
This is approximately 140 million years later than previously thought. It is an interesting result because it helps us to understand how structures such as stars and galaxies formed and evolved after the Big Bang.
The Planck team were studying the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang, the origin of our universe. The CMB can be traced to events that occurred only approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
