A Cambridge-led research team has found that climate change might be a universal phenomenon, with evidence of an intense warming period in the Universe’s early history.

Massive temperature changes occurred, from 8,000 degrees Celsius one billion years after the Big Bang to 12,000 degrees Celsius ‘only’ two and a half billion years later.

University of Cambridge astronomer Dr. George Becker, who led the study, explains how giant black holes, also called quasars, are suspected to be the cause of the temperature rise.

“Over the period of cosmic history we studied, quasars were becoming much more common. These objects, which are thought to swallow up material in the centres of galaxies, emit huge amounts of energetic ultraviolet light. These UV rays would have interacted with intergalactic gas, creating the rise in temperature”, explains Dr. Martin Haehnelt of the University of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology.

Most of the Universe was filled with a thin gas. The steady increase in temperature of this ‘intergalactic medium’ runs counter to the cosmic climate pattern: expansion of the Universe should make the gas cool down. But it continued growing despite the interaction between the energetic photons and the largely helium intergalactic gas. Once the Helium was used up, the temperature sank again.

Researchers observed the imprints from the lights given off the quasars on intergalactic gas clouds, using 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii and advanced simulations on a supercomputer in Cambridge.