First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

Abstract

The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years of the history of our Universe: stellar archaeology, detecting primordial hydrogen using 21 cm cosmological emission, and observing the earliest galaxies, most recently using the James Webb Space Telescope. This review will summarise why the first stars and galaxies are unique and worthy of observation, and the methods employed by the groundbreaking telescopes aiming to detect them.

This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary Physics on 22nd Nov 2022, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00107514.2022.2133417

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