Final Report Summary - FIRSTLIGHT (Unveiling first light from the infant Universe)
The project FirstLight has been part of a long-term Key Science Project. It aimed to develop all required calibration, imaging and analysis tools and methodologies to analyse thousands of hours of observations with the Low Frequency Array telescope and to ultimately detect the emission of neutral hydrogen from the first one billion years of the Universe.
More than half of the data are now in hand amounting to many petabytes of data. Also calibration, imaging and other data-processing pipelines are now in place and the first pilot results have recently been submitted for peer-review (attached to this report), providing already the highest-redshift power-spectrum upper limit on emission from neutral hydrogen within the infant Universe.
The project is expected to lead to a series of much deeper results based on 10-100 times more data than currently analysed in the coming year. It is also driven many developments and insights on the next-generation interferometer, the Square Kilometre Array being build in Western Australia.
More than half of the data are now in hand amounting to many petabytes of data. Also calibration, imaging and other data-processing pipelines are now in place and the first pilot results have recently been submitted for peer-review (attached to this report), providing already the highest-redshift power-spectrum upper limit on emission from neutral hydrogen within the infant Universe.
The project is expected to lead to a series of much deeper results based on 10-100 times more data than currently analysed in the coming year. It is also driven many developments and insights on the next-generation interferometer, the Square Kilometre Array being build in Western Australia.