The European Research Council has awarded Kasper Elm Heintz an ERC Starting Grant of EUR 1.4 million. ERC Starting Grants are awarded to some of Europe's most promising early-career researchers, enabling them to build their own research teams and pursue groundbreaking ideas.
The grant will fund Kasper Elm Heintz's new project, PRIMORDIAL, which addresses one of astrophysics' major questions: how the first stars and galaxies formed during the early Universe within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
The project investigates the critical role played by neutral hydrogen gas during the epoch of reionization. Neutral hydrogen served both as fuel for star formation and as a barrier against the high-energy light that would reionize the Universe.
By combining new observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the ALMA observatory with advanced cosmological simulations, Kasper Elm Heintz and his new research team will map early galaxies and provide a fundamental understanding of how the first light emerged in the Universe.
