Word: eras
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...discovery like that would give Ellis bragging rights at astronomy conferences for years to come, and it would let Stark finish his dissertation with a dramatic flourish. But far more important, it would give astrophysicists their first real glimpse into a crucial and mysterious era in the evolution of the cosmos. Known as the Dark Ages of the universe, it's the 200 million-year period (more or less) after the last flash of light from the Big Bang faded and the first blush of sun-like stars began to appear. What happened during the Dark Ages set the stage...
...however, even the mightiest telescopes haven't been able to penetrate into that murky era. "We have a photo album of the universe," says Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, "but it's missing pages--as though you had pictures of a child as an infant and then as a teenager, with nothing in between...
...copious amounts of high-energy ultraviolet radiation. One effect of that radiation would have been to knock apart hydrogen atoms, thus destroying their ability to block light. That process is known as reionization, and those stars, forming perhaps 100 million years into the Dark Ages, or roughly at the era's midpoint, might have rendered the universe transparent on their own if they had lived long enough. But unlike the sun, which has survived 5 billion years so far and should live another 5 billion, those stars lasted only a paltry million years. If the first stars formed 100 million...
Inflation era...
...sour all of Hollywood on Tom Cruise, and, by extension, other crazy or cranky stars, of which there are plenty. Since Redstone is not known for shooting from the lip, I'd guess that he, and perhaps other moguls, may be trying to tell its priciest talents that the era of $25 million paydays for a single picture - or the sort of star-studio deal that is lucrative only for the star - is over...