Our Universe was 'pre-heated' in its early moments, according to a new study from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), challenging assumptions it emerged from an ultracold state.

The discovery was made as astronomers hunted for an elusive signal from the Epoch of Reionization – the time when the first suns began to fire up about a billion years after the Big Bang .

Finding that the cosmos was at least a little warm around that time rules out models that suggest the ionization process occurred under extremely low temperature conditions.

"As the Universe evolved, the gas between galaxies expands and cools, so we would expect it to be very, very cold," says Cathryn Trott, radio astronomer and lead of the Epoch of Reionization project at ICRAR.

"Our measureme

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