Bowman and Alan Rogers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a small-scale radio astronomy experiment designed to detect a never-before-seen signal from the early universe during this period of time, a development that has the potential to revolutionize the understanding of how the first galaxies formed and evolved.
Thirteen billion years ago our universe was dark. There were neither stars nor galaxies; there was only hydrogen gas left over after the Big Bang. Eventually that mysterious time came to an end as the first stars ignited and their radiation transformed the nearby gas atoms into ions. This phase of the universe’s history is called the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), and it is intimately linked to many fundamental questions in cosmology. But looking back so far in time presents numerous observational challenges…
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