First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

Opens a window into a previously dark and secret time in our universe's history: when the first stars were born.

Astronomers have successfully observed a great deal of the Universe's history, from recording the afterglow of the Big Bang to imaging thousands of galaxies, and even to visualising an actual black hole. There's a lot for astronomers to be smug about. But when it comes to understanding how the Universe began and grew up, we are literally in the dark ages. In effect, we are missing the first one billion years from the timeline of the Universe.

This brief but far-reaching period in the Universe's history, known to astrophysicists as the 'Epoch of Reionisation', represents the start of the cosmos as we experience it today. The time when the very first stars burst into life, when darkness gave way to light. After hundreds of millions of years of dark, uneventful expansion, one by the one these stars suddenly came into being. This was the point at which the chaos of the Big Bang first began to yield to the order of galaxies, black holes and stars, kick-starting the pathway to planets, to comets, to moons, and to life itself.

Incorporating the very latest research into this branch of astrophysics, this book sheds light on this time of darkness, telling the story of these first stars, hundreds of times the size of the Sun and a million times brighter, lonely giants that lived fast and died young in powerful explosions that seeded the Universe with the heavy elements that we are made of. Dr Emma Chapman tells us how these stars formed, why they were so unusual, and what they can teach us about the Universe today. She also offers a first-hand look at the immense telescopes about to come on line to peer into the past, searching for the echoes and footprints of these stars, to take this period in the Universe's history from the realm of theoretical physics towards the wonder of observational astronomy.

Emma Chapman is a Royal Society research fellow based at Imperial College London, and one of the world's leading researchers in search of the first stars to exist in our Universe.

Emma is the recipient of multiple commendations and prizes, including the Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious science fellowships in the UK. She was presented with the Royal Society Athena Medal in 2018 and highly commended in the UK L'Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science award in 2017. In 2014, she won the Institute of Physics Jocelyn Bell Burnell Prize.

Emma is a respected public commentator, contributing regularly to the BBC on screen, over the airwaves and in printed media. She has presented at Cheltenham Science Festival, the European Open Science Forum and at New Scientist Live.

@DrEOChapman