Astronomy Colloquium

Piecing Together the Epoch of Reionization

Steve Furlanetto, UCLA,

The era of the first galaxies and reionization is one of the final frontiers of observational cosmology. At the moment, a wide range of observations provide tantalizing - but often confusing - clues. I will summarize our current knowledge about this epoch and its low-redshift analog, when helium is fully ionized. I will then describe how future observations can settle some of the important open questions that remain. When did reionization occur? What sources were responsible? How did the intergalactic medium affect the process? And what did it do to future generations of sources?

Event Sponsors:

Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - More events from this Sponsor

For more information, please contact Gina Armas by phone at 4671 or by email at [email protected] or visit http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~gma/colloquia.html.