Early Star-forming Galaxies and the Reionization of the Universe

Presented by Richard Ellis, California Institute of Technology

A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the hydrogen in deep space was ionized into its component protons and electrons. Theorists speculate this landmark event was caused by the birth of the first galaxies. Can powerful telescopes, probing back in cosmic history, directly witness this event? 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 for our origins, and discuss the future prospects with the James Webb Space Telescope and the next generation of 30 meter aperture ground-based telescopes.