09/04/2026
By Amanda Vozzo
Physics Colloquium
- Date: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026
- Time: 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
- Location: Olsen 503
Rigel Cappallo, a research scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory and an adjunct professor at UMass Lowell, will give a talk on “Searching for the First Stars – Traveling to the Ends of the Earth to Explore the Beginnings of the Universe.”
Abstract
There is a signature plastered across the entire sky that holds the key to understanding the formation of the very first stars in our universe. This signature is hidden within a cacophony of other signals; finding it is akin to detecting the flap of a hummingbird’s wings miles away in the middle of a hurricane. But it is not impossible. The EDGES experiment reported a detection of this signal for the first time in a 2018 paper in Nature and is currently deploying instruments in remote locations across the globe in order to solidify and enhance the initial detection. In 2022, I was part of two separate three-man teams that deployed the EDGES system in the outback of Western Australia and on Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island in the world, located far north in the Canadian Arctic. More recently, we deployed a fully autonomous system for the 2024-25 winter season in Adak, Alaska, an island in the middle of the Aleutian Island chain. In this talk, I will cover the science behind the signature we are searching for and the adventures involved in getting the instrument to such remote regions of the Earth.
Bio
Rigel Cappallo is a research scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. Previously, he spent 12 years at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, earning his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in physics, culminating in an additional year as a postdoctoral fellow. His research interests are wide-ranging, including modeling physical systems, pulsars, X-ray, optical and radio astronomy, and cosmology.