Open to everyone. Please arrive early to reserve seats.
Chandra Public Lecture by Hamsa Padmanabhan
Mapping The First Billion Years: Secrets from our Invisible Universe
The epoch of Cosmic Dawn — the birth of the first galaxies in our Universe, about a hundred million years after the Big Bang — is now directly observable, thanks to facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope.
The first galaxies transformed hydrogen — the most abundant element in the Universe — from its neutral to its ionised form, in a process known as Cosmic Reionization. Current research suggests that Reionization was complete when the Universe was approximately 1 billion years old.
An exquisite investigation of Cosmic Dawn is possible with a technique called intensity mapping (IM). IM probes the distribution of hydrogen using its 21 cm emission line, which manifests in the ‘invisible’ radio band. It will be able to unlock several thousand times more information than available from all surveys today. Along with synergies with complementary observations, these efforts have opened up the fascinating possibility to constrain theories of fundamental physics from the Cosmic Dawn.