Astronomers Are About to Detect the Light from the Very First Stars in the Universe

https://www.universetoday.com/14418...very-first-stars-in-the-universe/#more-144188

A team of scientists working with the Murchison Widefield Array (WMA) radio telescope are trying to find the signal from the Universe’s first stars. Those first stars formed after the Universe’s Dark Ages. To find their first light, the researchers are looking for the signal from neutral hydrogen, the gas that dominated the Universe after the Dark Ages.

It took a while for the first stars to form. After the Big Bang, the universe was extremely hot; too hot for atoms to form. Without atoms, there could be no stars. It wasn’t until about 377,000 years after the Big Bang that the Universe had expanded and cooled enough for atoms to form, mostly neutral hydrogen with a little helium. (And traces of lithium.) After that, the earliest stars started to form, during the Epoch of Reionization.

To find the elusive signal from that neutral hydrogen, the MWA was reconfigured. The MWA is in remote Western Australia, and it had 2048 radio antennas arranged into 128 “tiles” when it began operation in 2013. To hunt for the elusive neutral hydrogen signal, the number of tiles was doubled to 256, and the entire array was rearranged. All the data from these receivers is fed into a supercomputer called the Correlator.

A new paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal presents the results from the first analysis of data from the newly configured array. The paper is titled “First Season MWA Phase II EoR Power Spectrum Results at Redshift 7.” The lead researcher is Wenyang Li, a PhD student at Brown University.

This research was aimed at understanding the strength of the signal from the neutral hydrogen. The analysis set the lowest limit yet for that signal, a key result in the search for the faint signal itself.

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