The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe

Abstract

In the redshift range 100<(1+z)<137, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273-373K (0-100 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 10-17 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.

12 pages, accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology

References in corpus (3)

• The First Stars in The Universe
• Cosmological production of H_2 before the formation of the first galaxies
• An Observational Test for the Anthropic Origin of the Cosmological Constant

Cited by in corpus (16)

• The Rise of the First Stars: Supersonic Streaming, Radiative Feedback, and 21-cm Cosmology
• The Degree of Fine-Tuning in our Universe -- and Others
• Relative Likelihood for Life as a Function of Cosmic Time
• Subsurface Exolife
• Life under a black sun
• A Dyson Sphere around a black hole
• CEMP stars: possible hosts to carbon planets in the early universe
• Water Formation During the Epoch of First Metal Enrichment
• Pulsar Positioning System: A quest for evidence of extraterrestrial engineering
• Self-Interacting Dark Matter from Gravitational Scattering
• Exoplanet Exergy: Why useful work matters for planetary habitabilty
• Quantifying the Classification of Exoplanets: in Search for the Right Habitability Metric
• The Search for Directed Intelligence
• Future Exoplanet Research: Science Questions and How to Address Them
• Cosmic Initial Conditions for a Habitable Universe
• How bright was the Big Bang?