Scientists have probed a period of the universe's early history that no one has been able to explore before — and they got a surprise: It was far colder in the young universe, before the first stars blinked on, than astronomers previously thought.
To detect this extremely small signal from the universe's younger days, Rogers and his colleagues used an instrument with a radio antenna located in a remote, "radio quiet" desert in Western Australia, far from any cities, radio or TV stations, or cell phone networks.