What happened after the lights came on in the universe?

An experiment to explore the aftermath of cosmic dawn, when stars and galaxies first lit up the universe, has received nearly $10 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to expand its detector array in South Africa.

The experiment, an international collaboration called the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, or HERA, currently has 19 14-meter (42-foot) radio dishes aimed at the southern sky near Carnarvon, South Africa, and will soon up that to 37. The $9.5 million in new funding will allow the array to expand to 240 radio dishes by 2018.

Led by the University of California, Berkeley, HERA will explore the billion-year period after hydrogen gas collapsed into the first stars, perhaps 100 million years after the Big Bang, through the ignition of stars and galaxies throughout the universe. These first brilliant objects flooded the universe with ultraviolet light that split or ionized all the hydrogen atoms between galaxies into protons and electrons to create the universe we see today.

"The first galaxies lit up and started ionizing bubbles of gas around them, and soon these bubbles started percolating and intersecting and making bigger and bigger bubbles," said Aaron Parsons, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy and principal investigator for HERA. "Eventually, they all intersected and you got this über bubble, leaving the universe as we observe it today: Between galaxies the gas is essentially all ionized."

That's the theory, anyway. HERA hopes for the first time to observe this key cosmic milestone and then map the evolution of reionization to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

"We have leaned a ton about the cosmology of our universe from studies of the cosmic microwave background, but those experiments are observing just the thin shell of light that was emitted from a bunch of protons and electrons that finally combined into neutral hydrogen 380,000 years after the Big Bang," he said. "We know from these experiments that the universe started out neutral, and we know that it ended ionized, and we are trying to map out how it transitioned between those two."

"Before the cosmic dawn, the universe glowed from the cosmic microwave background radiation, but there weren't stars lighting up the universe," said David DeBoer, a research astronomer in UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory. "At some point the neutral hydrogen seeded the stars and black holes and galaxies that relit the universe and led to the epoch of reionization."

The HERA array, which could eventually expand to 350 telescopes, consists of radio dishes staring fixedly upwards, measuring radiation originally emitted at a wavelength of 21 centimeters – the hyperfine transition in the hydrogen atom – that has been red-shifted by a factor of 10 or more since it was emitted some 13 billion years ago. The researchers hope to detect the boundaries between bubbles of ionized hydrogen – invisible to HERA – and the surrounding neutral or atomic hydrogen.