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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1312.0613,
title = {The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe},
author = {Abraham Loeb},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.0613},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
12 pages, accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology