Why can't we see the universe's infancy clearly?
Image: Brody Wesner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Gunn–Peterson trough
Why can't we see the universe's infancy clearly?
Imagine trying to listen to a faint radio signal through a noisy crowd; the signal gets lost in the background noise.
The Gunn-Peterson trough is like that noisy crowd. It hides the early universe's signals because neutral hydrogen absorbed light at certain wavelengths, making it hard to see those ancient cosmic whispers.
Example
Just as you can't hear a whisper behind a loudspeaker's static, we can't see the universe's infancy through the Gunn-Peterson trough.
Remember this
The Gunn-Peterson trough is the cosmic static that obscures our view of the universe's infancy.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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