Lecture: The End of the Universe's Darkness

How can the techniques you learn during your study change our view on the universe? What can we do to help astronomers with their research on the birth of our universe? Professor Saleem Zaroubi will give a talk about the techniques behind the LOFAR project and how they are used to study the universes Epoch of Reionisation.

The End of the Universe's Darkness
A tale of a mighty telescope, powerful computers and a feeble signal

The Universe started its first galaxies around a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies mark a major phase transition in the Universe in which its gas transforms from neutral to ionized. This phase, know as the Epoch of Reionization, is one of the least studied periods in cosmology. The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope will track neutral hydrogen during this epoch for the first time, hence opening a completely new window to the Universe.

The signal coming from the dawn of Universe is very feeble and is hidden under many layers of contamination, distortion and noise. This very challenging project requires the extraction of the signal by sifting through petabytes of data using sophisticated computational techniques and very powerful computers.

Any questions or remarks? Don't hesitate to send an e-mail to ABCee@svcover.nl