AAO Colloquium
Thursday 23 September 2010
3:30pm AAO Conference Room
Did Galaxies Reionise the Universe?
Richard Ellis, Caltech
A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the hydrogen in deep space was
ionised into its component protons and electrons. Theorists speculate
this landmark
event was caused by the birth of the first galaxies.
Large telescopes have already traced the evolutionary history of
galaxies back to when the Universe was 1 billion years
old. The first results from the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard Hubble
Space Telescope give a glimpse at primitive stellar systems at yet earlier
times. The lecture will address the progress and challenges of this fundamental
quest and discuss the future prospects with the James Webb Space
Telescope and the next generation of 30-40 meter aperture ground-based
telescopes.
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