First light. Dawn at the dawn of time

First there was darkness.
During the first 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was dense and opaque. Eventually it cooled enough for photons of light to travel freely through space, even though at that time there was nothing in it that could glow. This period is called the cosmological Dark Ages. For hundreds of millions of years, in complete darkness, clouds of rarefied gas accumulated and compressed into incandescent spheres. And at some point in the bowels of one of these spheres, a thermonuclear reaction began - the very first dawn broke out, and darkness retreated before the light for the first time in history. This was the beginning of the cosmos as we see it today. It was the period when the chaos of the Big Bang gave way to order, giving way to planets, comets, moons, and eventually life.
Emma Champaign's book sheds light on these dark times, charting the story of the first stars, hundreds of times larger and millions of times brighter than the Sun, lone giants that burned violently and died young in super-powerful explosions.