The birth of the first stars marks the beginning of our "Cosmic Dawn" and the heating of the intergalactic medium above the temperature of the cosmic microwave background. Later, during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), radiation from the first galaxies ionized the intergalactic medium. The reionization process was the last major phase transition of the universe from a predominantly neutral to a predominantly ionized intergalactic medium. This process had a large impact on the subsequent galaxy formation and evolution.
Current observational constraints on the Cosmic Dawn and on the EoR are very limit and open to interpretation, however, in the next decade, several observational missions are expected to make detections of signals from these epochs leading to a huge step in our knowledge of the history of our universe.
I will discuss some of these missions, with an emphasis on Line Intensity Mapping surveys, and how they can be used to map stellar light from the Cosmic Dawn to the local Universe.
