First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

by Emma Chapman

Overview

First Light opens a window into a previously dark and secret time in our Universe's history – the time when the first starts were born.

Astronomers have successfully observed a great deal of the Universe's history, from recording the afterglow of the Big Bang to imaging thousands of galaxies, and even to visualising an actual black hole. There's a lot for astronomers to be smug about. But when it comes to understanding how the Universe began and grew up we are literally in the dark ages. In effect, we are missing the first one billion years from the timeline of the Universe.

This brief but far-reaching period in the Universe's history, known to astrophysicists as the 'Epoch of Reionisation', represents the start of the cosmos as we experience it today. The time when the very first stars burst into life, when darkness gave way to light. After hundreds of millions of years of dark, uneventful expansion, one by the one these stars suddenly came into being. This was the point at which the chaos of the Big Bang first began to yield to the order of galaxies, black holes and stars, kick-starting the pathway to planets, to comets, to moons, and to life itself.

Incorporating the very latest research into this branch of astrophysics, this book sheds light on this time of darkness, telling the story of these first stars, hundreds of times the size of the Sun and a million times brighter, lonely giants that lived fast and died young in powerful explosions that seeded the Universe with the heavy elements that we are made of. Emma Chapman tells us how these stars formed, why they were so unusual, and what they can teach us about the Universe today. She also offers a first-hand look at the immense telescopes about to come on line to peer into the past, searching for the echoes and footprints of these stars, to take this period in the Universe's history from the realm of theoretical physics towards the wonder of observational astronomy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472962942
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/28/2022
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	641,407
Product dimensions:	5.05(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Emma Chapman is a Royal Society research fellow and fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, based at Imperial College London. She is among the world's leading researchers in search of the first stars to exist in our Universe, and she is involved in both the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands and the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia.

@DrEOChapman

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Chapter 1 Over the Rainbow 21

Chapter 2 Where is Population III? 47

Chapter 3 The Small Bang 65

Chapter 4 A Lucky Cloud of Gas 87

Chapter 5 The Dark Ages 109

Chapter 6 Fragmenting Stars 139

Chapter 7 Stellar Archaeology 159

Chapter 8 Galactic Cannibalism 181

Chapter 9 The Cosmic Dusk 211

Chapter 10 The Epoch of Reionisation 229

Chapter 11 Unknown Unknowns 261

References 277

Acknowledgements 293

Index 295

Editorial Reviews

12/07/2020

Astrophysicist Chapman debuts with a spirited history of the early universe when stars “roared to life.” Her focus is on the period “from 380,000 years after the Big Bang to about 1 billion years after it,” known as the dark ages because of how little is known about it. Chapman begins by explaining light and the electromagnetic spectrum, and from there, surveys the first stars in the universe, Population III stars. The standard hypothesis, she explains, is that the stars were formed by gravity, combustion, and nuclear fusion acting upon clouds of gas. Chapman brings things up to the present with an outline of the ways astronomers are searching for data in the stars with huge arrays of terrestrial radio telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Chapman’s tone is conversational, and she has a knack for breaking down complex scientific material (the dark ages’ “missing cosmological data is equivalent to missing everything from the moment of conception to the first day of school”), though she can go on distracting tangents (as with a digression on King Tut’s tomb as a lead-in to “stellar archaeology”). Nonetheless, those looking for an introduction to stellar evolution will find much here to dig into. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

An illuminating-and entertaining-look at the earliest stars of our cosmos.
Chapman is a witty and straightforward guide … and her enthusiasm for the chase is infectious.
First Light conveys the wonder and mystery of darkness suddenly illuminated by magnificent starlight.” —Washington Post

“Throughout First Light, Chapman's authenticity and humour shine through. […] this is a charming book that was as fun to read as it was informative, making it as ideal for the casual reader as for those with an existing understanding of the field. – Ian Randall” —Physics World

“Her everyday examples of complex concepts are conversational, witty and elucidating … Chapman manages to effectively convey the gist of most of this most complicated of space sciences … Chapman's most valuable asset here, aside from her obvious expertise, is her enthusiasm ...
All of this is astounding, so much so that it almost defies explication, which is why it is such a treat to have someone of Chapman's stature willing to carry us along as she reaches for these ancient stars.” —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“First Light is a dispatch from the frontiers of science, from a brain fizzing with ideas and energy.” —Chris Lintott, BBC Sky at Night

“First Light is a fantastic debut on the popular science scene for Emma Chapman that fleshes out the context around these two key functions. My opinion: come for the state-of-the-art on the first stars, stay for the comprehensive primer on modern cosmology, and revel in the footnotes.” —Paul Woods, Nature Astronomy

"Clearly fascinated by her subject, Chapman works diligently to describe the early universe ... her careful step-by-step explanations delve far deeper than a NOVA documentary ... but most will find it worth the effort." - Kirkus Reviews

"Readers will happily follow along as Chapman covers centuries of speculation, unexplained anomalies, informed conjectures, and current reasoned suppositions. Her enthusiasm is contagious, and should strike just the right notes with audiences who enjoy pondering the mysteries of the universe." - Booklist

"[A] spirited history of the early universe when stars roared to life … those looking for an introduction to stellar evolution will find much here to dig into." - Publishers Weekly

"[A] thoroughly engaging tale that allows us to see science in the making, chronicles current attempts to reveal this hidden era ..." - The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

2020-10-22
An update on the early years of the cosmos.

In her first nonfiction book, Chapman reviews the history, including new discoveries which have overturned accepted theories on the evolution of the universe, but she reserves most of her excitement for the “dark ages”—from 380,000 to roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The early universe was a superheated soup of subatomic particles and energy. After nearly 400,000 years, the temperature had dropped enough to allow electrically neutral atoms to form and photons to travel freely. There was light and gas but nothing else. As it expanded and cooled, its matter—almost all hydrogen and helium—drifted about. Eventually, some clouds drifted together, and gravity began to pull. The clouds shrank and grew hotter, and a collapsing cloud grew so hot—millions of degrees—that its hydrogen became helium in a process known as fusion, which produces titanic amounts of energy. These were the first stars, born perhaps 180 million years after the Big Bang. Mostly brighter, hotter, bigger, and shorter-lived than today’s, they ended their lives and blew up, which produced “metals” (in astrophysics, elements other than hydrogen and helium) and scattered them, a process that formed other stars and eventually planets and humans. Do any primordial, metal-free stars still exist? The big ones are long gone, but small, sunlike stars have extremely long lifetimes. Evidence for their existence is turning up in obscure regions, such as dwarf galaxies and the outskirts of the Milky Way. Detecting them requires massive observatories, high-tech spectrographs, and the soon-to-be-launched $10 billion James Webb space telescope. Clearly fascinated by her subject, Chapman works diligently to describe the early universe, gradually introducing information about the life cycles of stars and techniques astrophysicists use to search for them. Her careful step-by-step explanations delve far deeper than a NOVA documentary, so readers must pay attention, but most will find it worth the effort.

Good astrophysics for committed readers.

Kirkus Reviews