3 ms·

Wasn't there a time for some time after big bang when the space was on average a lot more warm everywhere and conditions for life were incredibly more abundant

by dreen 10y ago

Wasn't there a time for some time after big bang when the space was on average a lot more warm everywhere and conditions for life were incredibly more abundant than now? I remember reading something like this here which would seem to be an antithesis to this article.

jessriedel 10y ago
I think you must be referring to this: > The "Dark Ages" span a period during which the temperature of cosmic background radiation cooled from some 4000 K down to about 60 K. The background temperature was between 373 K and 273 K, allowing the possibility of liquid water, during a period of about 7 million years, from about 10 to 17 million after the Big Bang (redshift 137–100). Loeb (2014) speculated that primitive life might in principle have appeared during this window, which he called "the Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe" . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dark_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dar... http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9371049&fileId=S1473550414000196 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag... Note that the other, Avi Loeb, is the same from the OP article. The cosmological dark ages lasted from photon decoupling (when photons started free streaming and the cosmic microwave background was born) to a few hundred million years later when the first stars begin to form. Loeb's suggestion is a narrow window of a few million years when the CMB itself would be the source of warmth, rather than stars. I'm not sure how matter was distributed on small scales during that time period.
- gojomo 10y ago
  Another popular account of the idea (via Loeb) that life (especially simple life) may have been more common earlier: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/mysteries_of_the_universe/2014/02/what_if_we_ve_misunderstood_our_place_in_the_universe_a_harvard_astronomer.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/mysteries_o...
- civilian 10y ago
  Does Loeb address whether there would have been oxygen and carbon 10-17 million years after the Big Bang? I thought that the heavier elements formed much later, and had to be forged in the center of stars. Our first generation of stars appeared 560million years after the Big bang. (Reference is the same wiki article you linked)
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    He talks about it in the paper. Basically, depending on your assumptions about nongaussianity of the primordial perturbations, there were at least a few stars simply by accident in the early universe.

by dreen 10y ago

jessriedel 10y ago

I think you must be referring to this: > The "Dark Ages" span a period during which the temperature of cosmic background radiation cooled from some 4000 K down to about 60 K. The background temperature was between 373 K and 273 K, allowing the possibility of liquid water, during a period of about 7 million years, from about 10 to 17 million after the Big Bang (redshift 137–100). Loeb (2014) speculated that primitive life might in principle have appeared during this window, which he called "the Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe" . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dark_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dar... http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9371049&fileId=S1473550414000196 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag... Note that the other, Avi Loeb, is the same from the OP article. The cosmological dark ages lasted from photon decoupling (when photons started free streaming and the cosmic microwave background was born) to a few hundred million years later when the first stars begin to form. Loeb's suggestion is a narrow window of a few million years when the CMB itself would be the source of warmth, rather than stars. I'm not sure how matter was distributed on small scales during that time period.

gojomo 10y ago
Another popular account of the idea (via Loeb) that life (especially simple life) may have been more common earlier: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/mysteries_of_the_universe/2014/02/what_if_we_ve_misunderstood_our_place_in_the_universe_a_harvard_astronomer.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/mysteries_o...
civilian 10y ago
Does Loeb address whether there would have been oxygen and carbon 10-17 million years after the Big Bang? I thought that the heavier elements formed much later, and had to be forged in the center of stars. Our first generation of stars appeared 560million years after the Big bang. (Reference is the same wiki article you linked)
- jessriedel 10y ago
  He talks about it in the paper. Basically, depending on your assumptions about nongaussianity of the primordial perturbations, there were at least a few stars simply by accident in the early universe.