LAUSR

The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years of the history of our Universe: stellar archaeology, detecting primordial hydrogen using 21 cm cosmological emission, and observing the earliest galaxies, most recently using the James Webb Space Telescope. This review will summarise why the first stars and galaxies are unique and worthy of observation, and the methods employed by the groundbreaking telescopes aiming to detect them. Abbreviations: LOFAR: low frequency array; SKA: square kilometre array; MWA: Murchison widefield array; EDGES: experiment to detect the global EoR signature; EoR: epoch of reionisation; JWST: James Webb space telescope.