Outback Astronomy

Chris Lintott travels to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Australia to find out how astronomers detected signals from the oldest stars in existence and what this discovery can reveal about the formation of the universe. In February 2018, news broke that astronomers had seen the cosmic dawn - the moment when stars first formed, flooding the universe with light. What's remarkable is that this incredible event was discovered by an instrument the size of a ping-pong table in a remote corner of Western Australia.