The Big Bang was not the moment of creation.
It was actually this.
The cosmic dawn, the moment that the very first star in the universe was formed,
and started forging the materials that we need to make you, me,
and everything around us.
This is your origin story.
Several million years after the Big Bang, the universe was dark and boring,
filled with cold hydrogen atoms floating through space.
All the things we treasure did not exist.
The Big Bang created space and time and all of the essential ingredients,
but it didn't create anything that was recognisable as our present day universe.
Instead, it left us with one of the most boring periods in the universe's history,
the cosmic Dark Ages.
If you go back to this time of the Dark Ages,
the universe looked completely different.
If you had a human observer translated back in time,
you would see a completely dark, boring, featureless universe.
An utterly alien place, it would appear to us.
It was a universe without any light.
There were no stars, no galaxy.
Now, the transformation of our universe into one that we would recognise
didn't start until the first stars were born.
The cosmic dawn would have been spectacular.
There was this magical, if you like, metaphysical moment.
It was the starting point that led to the appearance of life.
The moment of first light.
Let there be light.
The first stars are fundamental to how the universe evolved.
New galaxies were forming out of darkness.
This age of enlightenment was a very dynamic period of time.
What we found is that in the early universe, stars are much more massive,
maybe even 100 times more massive than the sun.
That has dramatic consequences because massive stars have a very different life,
a much more violent life than the kind of low mass star that the sun is.
They would be 20 times hotter, shining ultraviolet blue,
10 million times more luminous than the sun.
They can only live for very short time, only a few million years.
That's- that's really nothing.
You would say they're like the rock stars in the universe.
They live fast and die young.
Stars were appearing and disappearing.
It's like fireworks.
It's very dynamic.
It grew up exponentially, very quickly. Within tens of millions of years
there were plenty of stars filling up the universe.
The cosmic dawn is the beginning of complexity in the universe
that led to our existence.
So stars are essentially giant furnaces, right?
They take the simplest element, hydrogen, and they transform it into the
heavier elements needed for life.
This is why stars are so important.
They create the sugar, spice and all things nice needed to make you, me and the
Powerpuff Girls.
For the first time, new elements are being made.
They take hydrogen, turn it into helium, helium gets combined to make carbon,
and we go to oxygen and silicon.
The rocks that we see have been formed inside a stellar interior
and then thrown back out into the universe.
The gold and the silver in the rings on my finger,
they've all been made in a supernova.
There's no other place in the universe that you can create elements like that.
So it might sound like an Internet meme, but it's true.
We literally all are made of stardust.
We have astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge to thank for that.
She actually managed to figure out what was going on inside stars.
So, so far, so good, right?
We've got this epic theory of creation that took billions of years
just to get the ingredients for you and me.
But how do we actually go about proving that that's what happened?
So scientists are on the hunt for eyewitnesses, stars that could have been there
at that first moment, that cosmic dawn.
Luckily astronomers on the
search for ancient stars know what to look for.
We know that they are much bluer than the stars of today.
That's because ancient stars are made out of pure hydrogen
so they burn much more efficiently and therefore much hotter,
which means they're blue.
Think about like the flame on a hub or a Bunsen burner
which burns blue, compared to the flame of a candle or the dying embers of a fire
which burns orangey-red.
In 2013, Stefan Keller and his team found that needle in a haystack, an ancient star
in our own Milky Way galaxy that provides valuable clues about what happened
at the cosmic dawn.
At first, we thought we must have done something wrong here, but we confirmed it
the next night and that's when things really got exciting.
It has been around for thirteen point six billion years.
It's a very pristine star, it formed very early on in the history of the universe.
In fact, what we're able to do with this star is for the first time
say that there was only one star that preceded it.
So this is the purest star that we've ever found, making it the oldest star that we know of.
But it's still only a second generation star, not a first generation star,
the first to form in our universe.
We need to find one of those.
This is why astronomers are excited for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope
later this year, because it might just have a chance of spotting.
some of these first stars being born.
So there was the Big Bang and then a hundred million years of nothing,
and then there was the big switch when the universe finally turned on the lights.
The cosmic dawn.
This finally gives us a scientific answer to one of the biggest questions that
humanity has ever asked, one we've been searching for answers to for millennia.
Where did all this come from?
It turns out that the device you're watching this on, The chair you're sat on,
and even you yourself, well all of the stuff that makes all that comes from stars.
We are all curious where we came from.
If one opens the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible, the Old Testament,
one finds a version of this story,
How the universe started and how we humans came to live in it.
Some bits of this story are right.
There was a beginning in time. Light came into existence from darkness.
Life was created.
We are now at the special time that allows us to explore this question scientifically.
We are able to peer deep into space and see those very early
sources of light that tell us how we came into existence.
And of course, with modern technology, we're hoping to get the story much more accurate.