Public Lecture by Charlotte Mason
How did we get here? There is a missing chapter in our Universe’s history: we cannot see the first stars and galaxies that lit up the Universe. How and when did galaxies form from the primordial soup of atomic hydrogen and helium to produce the diversity we see today? This is still an open question and a frontier in astrophysics.
Theoretical models predict the first stars and galaxies formed in our Universe around 100 million years after the Big Bang. As they burned and exploded, the stars created every atom in our world, except hydrogen and helium, and the early galaxies were the building blocks for galaxies like our own home, the Milky Way. But all of this is untested – until now we have not been able to see the earliest galaxies, so we do not have concrete evidence for how these first stars and galaxies formed.
In the last few months, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has expanded our observational horizon to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and early results have challenged our theoretical models of how stars and galaxies formed. My research lies at the intersection of theoretical modelling and observations, and aims to analyse and interpret these data to understand the properties of the first generations of stars and how they set the stage for the subsequent evolution of our Universe.