On Monday, January 2, 2017 at 10:03:49 PM UTC-8, jacobnavia wrote:
After the big bang, the gas was too hot to form stars. A time must pass
to cool the universe so that the star formation could begin.=20

The important thing is to kindly
tell me if that time (262 My) is correct for the length of the dark
ages...=20

It doesn't seem relevant or perhaps even important to me what the
number is. The Big Bang is an idea that the universe explosively
began. But the idea that it originated from a tiny point basically
suggests that our universe originated (if correct) from the interior
of a black hole that breached confinement. Call it a singularity
or whatever, things exploded out of a tiny volume.

But the Big Bang doesn't posit what existed outside of that
singularity. There could have been an entire universe around a
black hole that breached confinement for all we know.

The point is to do the studies and search for the galaxies in the
oldest parts of the universe. And if we can find a bunch of them
in places they should not be able to be, then we will need to ponder
how to modify the big bang to include the new findings.

It's entirely possible that one region of the universe was cooler
than another so that stars and a galaxy could form unusually early.
It's possible a wave of star formation ripped through an entire
cloud of gas, fully forming a massive galaxy within a short period
of time.

But observing and establishing whatever in fact happened, is what
science is all about. For a galaxy to be found prior to some age
of the universe may be suggestive, but that's not proof without a
lot of evidence. =20

Water freezes at 0C. But under high pressure, it requires a lower
temp to freeze. It's possible that star formation in highly
compressed regions could have taken place at higher T than your
estimate.

Time ought to shine some light on all these ideas.

rt