Hunting for the first light during the epoch of reionisation.
Filipe Abdalla (UCL)

After recombination, the Universe became neutral and photons from the Cosmic Microwave background were were able for the .rst time to travel freely to us. During that time the Universe was dark with no other sources of light. It was only much later, around one billion years after the Big Bang, that the first objects started forming. This epoch, called the Epoch of reionisation (EoR), is the epoch in the lifetime of our Universe when these first stars or quasars started producing UV light and ionising their surrounding medium once again. It is an epoch full of physics, including astrophysics and cosmology. As astronomers we have never been able to take a picture of this crucial time in our Universes lifetime. I will review the physics during this epoch and also how we aim to detect this cosmic signal using independent component analysis to remove the foregrounds which plague this Epoch of Reionisation detection with a radio telescope. I will also give an update of the Observational status of several differrnt projects in this area.