AGM & Lecture - What happened in the first billion years of the Universe? - Emma Chapman

What happened in the first billion years of the Universe? Emma Chapman will tell us what happened after the Big Bang, when the very first stars burst into life, why those stars were so unusual, and what they can teach us about the Universe today. She will also introduce some of the largest radio telescopes on Earth and how we can harness them to look back in time.

Emma Chapman is currently based at Imperial College London, where she is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow. Emma has spent her research career in London so far, completing her PhD and first postdoctoral position at UCL before heading off to Imperial College for a Royal Astronomical Society fellowship. Her research is in the Epoch of Reionisation, a rather off-putting name for a very exciting time in our Universe – when the lights first switched on! As those first stars formed and starting flinging out high energy radiation, they formed bubbles of ionised hydrogen around them. We can observe this hydrogen today with radio telescopes and the race is on to make the first detection of the Epoch of Reionisation. Emma works mainly with the European telescope LOFAR based in the Netherlands.