Friday, January 13 at 7:30 p.m.

Live at Willcox Hall, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY or via ZOOM (link on WAA home page)

Cosmic eras in the infant universe: what was happening during the first billion years?

Paul O’Connor
Instrumentation Scientist, Brookhaven National Laboratory

The more scientists discover about the ingredients that make up our Universe and the ways in which they evolved from a featureless gas to the systems of stars and galaxies that we see today, the more we recognize the need for new observations — ones which can extend our reach across time and space to resolve questions at the foundations of fundamental physics. This has led to an effort within the High Energy Physics community, formerly concerned with particle accelerators to study the subatomic world, to build large facilities and instruments designed to tackle the big open questions of cosmology. This lecture will review progress on Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (Vera Rubin Observatory) construction, and will present several new instrument concepts for studying the physics of the early universe using the highly-redshifted radiation from atomic hydrogen which we observe in the radio frequency wavelength range.

Free and open to the public!