Stars in the making
For decades, scientists have sought to develop newer and more powerful ways to peer into the far reaches of the cosmos and into the early days of the universe, both with optical telescopes and powerful radio telescopes. But a new paper, published last month in Nature and authored by Eli Visbal, a graduate student in Harvard’s Physics Department, with colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University, suggests that it may be far easier than commonly thought to peer deep into the universe’s history and observe the telltale signs of the first stars and galaxies. Using powerful computer models, Visbal and colleagues simulated how stars formed in the universe’s infancy clump together into massive web-like structures. The key to the simulation, he said, was the inclusion of a 2010 discovery that normal matter, such as hydrogen gas, and dark matter — which makes up more than 80 percent of...