While the cosmic microwave background tells us about the first 450,000 years after the big bang, the cosmic optical background tells us something about the sum total of all the stars that have ever formed since then, it puts a constraint on the total number of galaxies that have been created, and where they might be in time.

Marc Postman

Marc Postman (born 1958) is an American astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. His research interests include observational studies of the formation and evolution of galaxies and large scale structure in the universe. His work focuses on determining, observationally, the relationships between galaxy-scale phenomena and the surrounding large-scale environment and matter distribution.

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