Section 1: Introduction & Plan

Our journey begins at the start of all things, shortly after the
Big Bang, when the universe was a hot seething, roiling
plasma, a dense cloud of protons neutrons and electrons. As
the universe cooled down enough, around the 400,000 years
mark, hydrogen atoms began to form, an event known as
recombination. Everything faded to black. Welcome to the
Dark Age of the Universe. (30s)
The darkness however did not last for ever, it eventually was
lifted as light gradually but relentlessly broke the hydrogen
apart, a process know as reionization. How and over what
time period this happened are the two questions I will try to
answer today. We will be examining three possible
candidates that were involved in the reionization: firstly
superstars, then quasars and finally early galaxies. (1m20)
Before I start, let me tell you a little bit about the reason why
I chose this particular topic. It points to the deeper,
philosophical level of this talk. I find it amazing that a
species with such a tiny lifetime relative to the lifetime of
things it tries to explain has transcended that limitation by
unselfishly devoting itself to the pursuit of knowledge and
passing it on to the next generation, leading to the
achievement of incredible feats. I think this is what this
presentation is reflecting. Homo sapiens have existed for
200,000 years and the tools developed in the last say 3000
years allow us to look back and conjecture about events that
happened 10 billion years ago. (2m30)
Section 2: Superstars
Just after recombination, the hydrogen was spread uniformly
through space. Dark matter, on the other hand, accumulated
in very dense clouds known as halos of mass of the order of
100,000 times to a million times the mass of the sun. The
hydrogen was sucked into these clouds by gravity. As the
hydrogen was concentrated, temperature rose and the first
stars of the universe were thus created. These were giant
stars (astronomers call them Population III stars), quite
unlike the ones we observe today. Could these have
reionized the universe? That depends on their size. (50s)

See, at the time, there were no ingredients such as carbon or

oxygen during the star formation, which help to cool down
gases, meaning they have a lower pressure. In star
formation, radiation pressure opposes gravity, so a lower
pressure means that the cloud of dust can contract until it
becomes very dense, dense enough to burst into a fusion
reaction. Without these 'ingredients'', the star would just
gorge itself on more and more gas until it built a massive,
diffuse core, as you can see in the picture. The story is in
fact slightly more complicated than that, but I don't have
time to go into more details. (1m30)
Depending on what equations and simulations you use, you
obtain a range of possible masses for these stars, ranging
from a fragment of our solar mass to a million time as
massive as the sun.
Why is that important? Because giant stars of more than 100
solar masses live fast and die young. Smaller stars could
have fuelled the reionization but then the process would
have been a very long one, spanning many hundreds of
millions of years. (2m30)
Section 3: Quasars
All of the stars, however massive they may have been,
ended their existence in supernovae before collapsing into
black holes. These black holes may have helped fuelled the
engine of reionization. How? Black holes swallow gas, and
that gas is compressed and heated to millions of degrees.
Most of it is absorbed by the black hole, but some of it spews
out back into space in the form of jets. These jets shine so
brightly that we can see their light from very far away. We
call these beacons 'quasars'.
The first quasar discovered in the 60s had a redshift of 0.16,
indicating that its light had begun to travel 2 billion years
ago.
Then, quickly, people started discovering quasars with
redshift 2 (a look back at more than 10 billion years ago),
then 4.9 (just 1 billion years after the Big Bang) by 1991. Yet
this quasar's spectrum didn't show any evidence that light
was absorbed by the hydrogen. We must conclude the

universe was already reionized by that time. (1m30)

It took a long time to find higher redshifted quasars, because
quasars are rare to begin with. To see a quasar, you need to
have the jet of gas aimed directly at you. Furthermore, these
jets only shine brightly if the black hole is actively
swallowing gas - that kind of activity peaks for quasars with
a redshift between 2 and 3.
Finally, a quasar at redshift 7.085, 700 million years after the
Big Bang was found. They found small but significant amount
of UV absorbing hydrogen in the spectrum. However, "the
number of quasars is falling so steeply with distance that it is
inconceivable that massive black holes are a major source of
radiation that reionized the universe. (2m30)
Section 4: Early Galaxies
Even as the hunt for distant quasars has stalled, the search
for early galaxies has taken off. It was triggered by a famous
image called the Hubble Deep Field, obtained by pointing the
Hubble telescope at a small region of space for a
considerable amount of time. It revealed several thousand
small, faint galaxies. More pictures were taken and a few
were found to have a redshift of 7 or more.
Published in a 2012 paper was one believed to be at redshift
11.9, fewer than 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Looking at the spectrum once again, scientist found a
significant fraction of UV light missing absorbed by the
Hydrogen. This fraction drops until about a billion years after
the the Big Bang, when the universe became transparent.
Not only did the galaxies provide a source of ionising
radiation, it reveals how the universe made the transition
from neutral to fully ionized.
What's the catch then?
Well, if you take all the galaxies discovered with a redshift
above 7, and extrapolate across the entire sky, you still don't
have enough total uv radiation to ionise all the neutral
hydrogen. So what? Maybe there are many more galaxies
that are simply too dim to see with any existing telescope. It
is a reasonable assumption. (2m 10)

Section 4: Where do we go from here?

Now, where do we go from here? The Universe has supplied
its own, natural lenses that can boost our instruments'
power. I am of course talking about gravitational lenses.
They take advantage of the fact that massive objects, e.g.
clusters of galaxies warp the space around them, distorting
and sometimes magnifying the objects that lie beyond. You
can see some galaxies that are 10 to 20 times brighter than
comparable unlensed galaxies. A new project involving the
Hubble telescope will help us probe even further.
Gamma-ray burst, another kind of cosmic beacons, could be
an even better probe of the early universe. They are emitted
by stars as they are swallowed by a black hole. These bursts
are quite short but so bright they outshine galaxies by a
factor of a million and are 10 to 100 times brighter than
quasars. Downside: 99% of bursts are pointed away from
Earth and a minuscule fraction detected by satellites are at
high redshift. (1m30)
We can also build bigger telescopes. The James Webb
telescope is expected to be operating within the next
decade. It will be able to collect much more light than its
predecessor, thus allowing us to see ever further in time.
(1m45)
I