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the law of any living thing: it develops in stages from birth through life and ultimately to death. We understand the early stages of its life because observations by scientists have provided valuable information as to how the Universe was created, and also fill in the crucial facts about the history of the Universe thus far. We are living in an early phase of our universe, the Stelliferous Era, with many more stages of life and change still to come, and yet we can confidently make predictions about our Universe’s future. By observing the life cycles of the stars above us we can map out the remaining years of our universe’s life.

Nathalie Lees © HarperCollins

THE LIFE OF THE UNIVERSE

Just as human beings, planets and stars are born, live their lives and die, so the Universe also lives its life in distinct stages. It began 13.75 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and in this embryonic period, known as the Primordial Era, the Universe was a place without the light from the stars, although in its early years the swirling hot matter would have glowed as brightly as a sun. For the first 100 million years, the conditions were far too violent for stars to form. This changed when the Universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently for the weak force of gravity to begin to clump the primordial dust, gas and dark matter into galaxies. With this came the dawning of the second great epoch in the life of our universe: the Stelliferous Era, the age of stars.

The moment the first stars were born is one of the most evocative milestones in the evolution of the cosmos. It signals the end of an alien time when the Universe was without structure – a formless void. The beginning of the Stelliferous Era marks the beginning of the age of light, the moment when the Universe would have become recognisable to us. The sky would have become black, punctuated with the glowing mist of the galaxies and the sharp silver of the stars. This is our universe today – a place where starlight decorates our nights and illuminates our days.

The Sun is one of at least two hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and it, along with countless others, shine brightly over Earth, night and day, in an ever-changing, ever-evolving cosmos.

Our sun is one of at least two hundred billion stars in our galaxy; one of a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. We live in a cosmos of countless islands of countless stars which bathe the Universe in light. Yet despite the fact that the Universe is over 13 billion years old, we are still just at the beginning. Although the cosmos is awash with stars, is populated with vast nebulae and systems of planets and countless billions of worlds that we’ve yet to explore, we are living close to the beginning of the Stelliferous Era, an era of astonishing beauty and complexity. But the cosmos isn’t static and unchanging; it won’t always be this way because as the arrow of time plays out, it produces a cosmos that is as dynamic as it is beautiful.

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The moment the first stars were born is one of the most evocative milestones in the evolution of the cosmos…it marks the beginning of the age of light, the moment when the Universe would have become recognisable to us.

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In our age of stars, the Milky Way Galaxy is filled with stars igniting and scattering their light across the night sky.

A gamma-ray burst is one of the Universe’s most spectacular and luminous explosions. As the core of a dying star collapses into a black hole, gas jets blast out from it into space.

This dramatic image shows the gamma-ray burst from GRB 090423, combining data from the Ultraviolet/Optical (blue, green) and X-ray (orange, red) telescopes of NASA’s Swift satellite.

NASA

THE FIRST STAR

On 23 April 2009 at 07.55 GMT, NASA’s Swift detected one of the most distant cosmic explosions ever seen – a gamma-ray burst that lasted ten seconds. The Swift satellite was designed and built with the intention that it would aid the study of a rare type of event known as a gamma-ray burst. These events, which last only a few seconds,