In the arid desert of Western Australia, near Perth, astronomers are on the hunt for evidence of the universe’s first-ever stars.
To do this, they are seeking out the signal of the neutral hydrogen that pervaded the early universe some 13 billion years ago, before the so-called ‘cosmic dawn’.
Physicists expect this signal to decrease and eventually disappear as the first stars, galaxies and quasars formed and gradually ionised the hydrogen around them.
However, picking up this signal is like