According to a report in the scientific journal Nature, author Judd Bowman from the University of Arizona (USA) stated that a radio antenna costing less than $5 million successfully captured the delicate light in the form of radio signals from 13.6 billion years ago. These signals originated from stars that had just emerged from what seemed like eternal darkness, approximately 180 million years after the Big Bang.
Observing the universe at its faintest glow, even in the form of feeble signals, is more significant than the birth of the universe itself because “human beings are made of the stuff of stars, so essentially, we are looking at our own origins,” according to astronomer Richard Ellis, who is not associated with this project.
Not only have the experts captured the earliest light of the universe, but they have also likely discovered the enigmatic dark matter that has remained elusive to human observation. The majority of the universe is composed of dark matter, a mysterious form of matter that has yet to be detected and barely interacts with the “normal” matter surrounding it.
Within the Milky Way, dark matter outweighs regular matter by a factor of five, and this ratio is even higher in a group of small dwarf galaxies. The signals analyzed by Dr. Bowman’s team exhibit extremely low temperatures and an unusual wave pattern. Specifically, the hydrogen gas between these stars is “even colder than absolute zero (-268oC) as we know it,” according to Rennan Barkana, an astrophysicist at Tel Aviv University. The only explanation for this phenomenon is that they are observing dark matter.
If the results are replicated in independent reports, this could be the first time that humanity has discovered the elusive form of dark matter that scientists have been searching for over many decades. “If confirmed, this discovery deserves two Nobel Prizes” for successfully capturing signals from the earliest stars and providing evidence of the actual presence of dark matter, according to Avi Loeb, an astronomer from Harvard University. Meanwhile, Dr. Bowman states, “This is a stage of the universe about which we know nothing,” and the discovery marks the “first opening act” for the long and fascinating history of cosmic enlightenment.