PsiStar (the Physics and Astronomy Society) pressents our first talk of the year - 'Mapping the Cosmos with Next Generation Radio Telescopes' by Dr Phil Bull

We are now entering the era of giant radio telescopes -- arrays of tens or even hundreds of dishes have either recently been built or are under construction in remote locations, all of them hoping to discover previously unseen phenomena that are inaccessible to optical telescopes. Using these telescopes, we can hope to map out a very large fraction of the entire Universe in 3D -- from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies lit up, until the present day -- using the weak radio emission from neutral hydrogen. I will give an overview of the machines that will survey the cosmos, and the challenges we face in making maps in the presence of many bright sources of radio "noise".