The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe- 15 million years after the Big Bang [View all]

[n2doc]

Last edited Wed Dec 11, 2013, 09:35 AM - Edit history (1)

In the redshift range 100< ( 1+z)<110, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273-300K (0-30 degrees Celsius), allowing early rocky planets (if any existed) to have liquid water chemistry on their surface and be habitable, irrespective of their distance from a star. In the standard LCDM cosmology, the first star-forming halos within our Hubble volume started collapsing at these redshifts, allowing the chemistry of life to possibly begin when the Universe was merely 15 million years old. The possibility of life starting when the average matter density was a million times bigger than it is today argues against the anthropic explanation for the low value of the cosmological constant.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613