How Radio Telescopes Reveal the Cosmic Dawn

We spend a lot of time marveling at the visible universe through optical telescopes, but there is an entire hidden sky waiting to be discovered through radio waves. In this lecture, Dr. Akshatha Vydula, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Richmond, explores how faint emissions from neutral hydrogen gas let scientists peer back to the Cosmic Dawn, the earliest era when the first stars and galaxies formed.

Akshatha will explain how an astonishingly small signal, just a fraction of a percent of the static in an ordinary radio, can help constrain the age of the universe itself. She works across some of the most remote radio observatories on Earth, including the EDGES telescope in Western Australia and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and contributes to LuSEE-Night, a Berkeley-led lunar lander launching soon to observe the sky from the far side of the Moon.

From car radios to lunar missions, this talk traces how radio astronomy is transforming our understanding of cosmic origins.