Lincoln Greenhill describes the time period between the Big Bang and emergence of the first stars and galaxies, and particularly a period of about one hundred million years when the universe became transparent but there was no light. This is known as the "Dark Age" of the universe. In this presentation, Dr. Greenhill discusses what astronomers today know about this important phase in the evolution of the cosmos and the radio telescopes that astronomers have recently begun to use to test their theories for the first time. He describes one facility that his team has helped build in California's Sierra mountains. He shows examples of the radio telescopes used by his team and also real-time radio astronomy data.
Lincoln Greenhill is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Astronomy, and he is a Radio Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His primary research interests at present are the Cosmological Dark Age and Epoch of Reionization, supermassive black holes that lie in the centers of galaxies, signal processing, and massively parallel real-time stream computing with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).