Missing Pages in Our Photo Album of the Infant Universe

Abstract

Existing data sets include an image of the Universe when it was 0.4 million years old (in the form of the cosmic microwave background), as well as images of individual galaxies when the Universe was older than a billion years. But there is a serious challenge: in between these two epochs was a period when the Universe was dark, stars had not yet formed, and the cosmic microwave background no longer traced the distribution of matter. And this is precisely the most interesting period, when the primordial soup evolved into the rich zoo of objects we now see. In this popular-level overview, I describe how astronomers plan to observe this nearly-invisible yet crucial period.

Popular level review, to appear in "Physica Plus" magazine, Vol. 8; a modified version with original artwork appeared in Scientific American, 295, 46, 2006 (see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~loeb/sciam.pdf)