What was it like when the cosmic dark ages ended?

For 550 million years, neutral atoms blocked the light made in stars from traveling freely through the Universe. Here’s how it then changed. Forming stars sounds like the easiest thing in the Universe to do, given enough time. However, making stars that are actually visible to an observer is, perhaps surprisingly, a lot more challenging. Once you get a sufficiently large amount of mass together, so long as you give it enough time to gravitate, you’ll b able to watch it collapse down into small, dense clumps. If enough mass comes together in those clumps under the right conditions, stars will no doubt ensue. This is how you form stars today, and it’s how we’ve formed stars all throughout our cosmic history, going back to the very first ones some 50–100 million years after the Big Bang. <a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-was-it-like-when-the-cosmic-dark-ages-ended-cf491c63d54c">Website</a>