Key points: First stars, assembly of galaxies, role of dark matter in galaxy growth

Era of Nuclei

Era of Atoms

After recombination the concentrations could cool and attract more matter. For more, see http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/physics/physics.html

The simulation to the left shows how the matter was attracted into large scale structures that are where galaxies eventually formed . simulations were performed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications by Andrey Kravtsov (The University of Chicago) and Anatoly Klypin (New Mexico State University). Visualizations by Andrey Kravtsov. The one to the right shows more detail, from National Center for Supercomputer Applications by Andrey Kravtsov (The University of Chicago) and Anatoly Klypin (New Mexico State University). http://cfcp.uchicago.edu/lss/group.html (reload to restart text animations)

Exactly how this happened, we do not know -- but we know it did because we see galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field at about 1 billion years into the life of the Universe.

The Boomerang experiment launch is shown under the map obtained of the sky. http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/fsballoon.htm		Depiction of the epoch of reionization from Loeb, 2006, Scientific American
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