One of the ultimate goals of all of astrophysics has always been to work out when the very first stars formed in the Universe.
Now you might have heard people talk about how incredible JWST is and how we can see galaxies further back than ever before but JWST can’t see back to the first stars forming.
So, if we want to observe the era when the very first stars form, we have to get clever, and turn instead to radio astronomy, to try and detect the impact that the first stars had on the hydrogen gas around them, to pinpoint when that happened in the universe’s history and complete that missing bit of the puzzle.
Now people have been trying to do this for years with ever growing radio telescopes, and there was even a tentative claim of a detection back in 2018 from Bowman and collaborators which has been under a lot of scrutiny in the past few years, and now everyone’s hopes are resting on the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope...
00:00 - Introduction
02:44 - Squarespace AD
04:13 - What are the first stars (known as Population III stars) thought to be like?
08:57 - What impact do they have on the Universe
12:02 - How we hope to detect that impact
15:41 - The tentative detection from Bowman and collaborators in 2018
20:19 - How the Square Kilometre Array should help
24:02 - Bloopers