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 the universe — move through the universe at different
speeds.  Those web-like structures, Visbal s