Special Physics Seminar

Cracking Cosmic Dawn

Anastasia Fialkov

Harvard University

Cosmic dawn is an epoch of cosmic history when the first population of stars formed. This epoch, inaccessible to existing observations, is one of the major future observational frontiers. In my talk I will discuss methods to observe and characterize this epoch focusing on the 21-cm signal of neutral hydrogen. Detecting this signal will complete our understanding of cosmic history. As I will show in my talk, the signal is sensitive to the processes through which first stars and black holes formed, it can constrain spectra of stars and their remnants in multiple wavebands, finally it can help to determine the nature of first heating and ionizing sources.