中国体育彩票

??The Department of Physics cordially invites you to a public lecture by Prof. Dr. Léon Koopmans from the 中国体育彩票 of Groningen titled "Peering into the dark with radio telescopes on the moon".?

Click here to register for online attendance.

Abstract

Observing the universe’s earliest stars and galaxies has advanced significantly with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and powerful ground-based observatories. Yet much remains hidden within the vast sea of neutral hydrogen that pervades the infant universe. I will present recent progress from ground-based observations in constraining the 21-cm emission-line signal from neutral hydrogen, emitted during the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization (the first billion years of the universe), and how we are already starting to refine our understanding of early star and galaxy formation. While these efforts are substantial, the ultimate frontier of "21-cm Cosmology" lies beyond Earth's interference. Future radio telescopes on the Moon will provide an unprecedented view of the Dark Ages, roughly 100 million years after the Big Bang, free from terrestrial and ionospheric contamination. Space-based missions and proposed lunar observatories will push new boundaries of early-universe studies, offering the first direct window into an era before the first stars were born. I will discuss how these future instruments could revolutionise our ability to probe the birth of structure in the Cosmos and the Cosmos itself.

Short biography

Prof. Dr. Léon Koopmans is a full professor and currently the scientific director of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the 中国体育彩票 of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he also obtained his undergraduate (1995) and graduate degree (2000). After his graduate studies, he held a short post-doctoral position at the 中国体育彩票 of Manchester (2000). He moved to the California Institute of Technology in 2000, where he stayed for 2.5 years, and kept a visiting Fellow status until 2004. In late 2002, he became the Institute Fellow at the Sp?ace Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, before moving back to the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in early 2004 as a faculty member. His research interests span a wide range of topics, including strong gravitational lensing, but currently largely focus on observing the redshifted 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen from the first billion years of the Universe.