Witnessing the deaths of the first stars in the Universe - from Hawthorn

In this talk, I will take you back to a time shortly after the Big Bang when the first stars emerged from the darkness. Many of these stars were much more massive than our Sun and ended their short lives as extraordinarily brilliant supernova explosions. Using new techniques and the power of the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, now controllable from Swinburne, we are able to detect supernova explosions that occurred more than 12 billion years ago and are hot on the trail toward detecting the deaths of the very first stars.