Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has just published a paper about how life might have flourished when our 13.8-billion-year-old universe was a mere 15 million years old. Back then, the whole universe was warmer — which means liquid water could exist even on planets that were distant from their stars.
Writes Loeb in the abstract for the paper:
In the redshift range 100<(1+z)<110, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273-300K (0-30 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 15 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.
Though we often think of the early universe as inhospitable, Loeb notes that if rocky planets existed, it would have been a great time to live on them. No matter where they were in the universe, they would have been bathed in constant warmth, with no need to depend on a star for energy. And the warmth would have made surface water a liquid, too, which would help life as we know it to develop.
Read more at io9
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