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In the Beginning: The First Sources of Light and the Reionization of the Universe
The formation of the first stars and quasars marks the transformation of the
universe from its smooth initial state to its clumpy current state. In popular
cosmological models, the first sources of light began to form at redshift 30
and reionized most of the hydrogen in the universe by redshift 7. Current
observations are at the threshold of probing the hydrogen reionization epoch.
The study of high-redshift sources is likely to attract major attention in
observational and theoretical cosmology over the next decade.Comment: Final revision: 136 pages, including 42 figures; to be published in
Physics Reports 2001. References updated, and a few minor corrections made.
In this submission, several figures were compressed, resulting in just a
slight reduction in quality; a postscript file with the full figures is
available at http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~barkana/review.htm