Editor's Note: We are posting this feature from our March 2002 issue because of news from the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society about the phenomenon discussed here.

We live in a universe that is full of bright objects. On a clear night one can see thousands of stars with the naked eye. These stars occupy merely a small nearby part of the Milky Way galaxy; telescopes reveal a much vaster realm that shines with the light from billions of galaxies. According to our current understanding of cosmology, however, the universe was featureless and dark for a long stretch of its early history. The first stars did not appear until perhaps 100 million years after the big bang, and nearly a billion years passed before galaxies proliferated across the cosmos. Astronomers have long wondered: How did this dramatic transition from darkness to light come about?

After decades of study, researchers have recently made great strides toward answering this question. Using sophisticated computer simulation techniques, cosmologists have devised models that show how the density fluctuations left over from the big bang could have evolved into the first stars. In addition, observations of distant quasars have allowed scientists to probe back in time and catch a glimpse of the final days of the “cosmic dark ages.”

The new models indicate that the first stars were most likely quite massive and luminous and that their formation was an epochal event that fundamentally changed the universe and its subsequent evolution. These stars altered the dynamics of the cosmos by heating and ionizing the surrounding gases. The earliest stars also produced and dispersed the first heavy elements, paving the way for the eventual formation of solar systems like our own. And the collapse of some of the first stars may have seeded the growth of supermassive black holes that formed in the hearts of galaxies and became the spectacular power sources of quasars. In short, the earliest stars made possible the emergence of the universe that we see today—everything from galaxies and quasars to planets and people.

The Dark Ages  The study of the early universe is hampered by a lack of direct observations. Astronomers have been able to examine much of the universe’s history by training their telescopes on distant galaxies and quasars that emitted their light billions of years ago. The age of each object can be determined by the redshift of its light, which shows how much the universe has expanded since the light was produced. The oldest galaxies and quasars that have been observed so far date from about a billion years after the big bang (assuming a present age for the universe of 12 billion to 14 billion years). Researchers will need better telescopes to see more distant objects dating from still earlier times.

Cosmologists, however, can make deductions about the early universe based on the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was emitted about 400,000 years after the big bang. The uniformity of this radiation indicates that matter was distributed very smoothly at that time. Because there were no large luminous objects to disturb the primordial soup, it must have remained smooth and featureless for millions of years afterward. As the cosmos expanded, the background radiation redshifted to longer wavelengths and the universe grew increasingly cold and dark. Astronomers have no observations of this dark era. But by a billion years after the big bang, some bright galaxies and quasars had already appeared, so the first stars must have formed sometime before. When did these first luminous objects arise, and how might they have formed?

Many astrophysicists, including Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge and Abraham Loeb of Harvard University, have made important contributions toward solving these problems. The recent studies begin with the standard cosmological models that describe the evolution of the universe following the big bang. Although the early universe was remarkably smooth, the background radiation shows evidence of small-scale density fluctuations—clumps in the primordial soup. The cosmological models predict that these clumps would gradually evolve into gravitationally bound structures. Smaller systems would form first and then merge into larger agglomerations. The denser regions would take the form of a network of filaments, and the first star-forming systems—small protogalaxies—would coalesce at the nodes of this network. In a similar way, the protogalaxies would then merge to form galaxies, and the galaxies would congregate into galaxy clusters. The process is ongoing: although galaxy formation is now mostly complete, galaxies are still assembling into clusters, which are in turn aggregating into a vast filamentary network that stretches across the universe.

According to the cosmological models, the first small systems capable of forming stars should have appeared between 100 million and 250 million years after the big bang. These protogalaxies would have been 100,000 to one million times more massive than the sun and would have measured about 30 to 100 light-years across. These properties are similar to those of the molecular gas clouds in which stars are currently forming in the Milky Way, but the first protogalaxies would have differed in some fundamental ways. For one, they would have consisted mostly of dark matter, the putative elementary particles that are believed to make up about 90 percent of the universe’s mass. In present-day large galaxies, dark matter is segregated from ordinary matter: over time, ordinary matter concentrates in the galaxy’s inner region, whereas the dark matter remains scattered throughout an enormous outer halo. But in the protogalaxies, the ordinary matter would still have been mixed with the dark matter.