Ricerc@Sapienza

The transition from the "dark ages" in the history of the Universe to "cosmic dawn" saw the formation of the first autonomous sources of radiation, stars and black holes. Excitingly, we are at the verge of a revolution of research into the transition from the dark ages to cosmic dawn. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in October 2021 will enable an unprecedented epochal leap forward. JWST will offer the very first opportunity to find and fully characterize the first galaxies and to explore the nature of the sources of reionization, with the ultimate goal of detecting the signatures of the very first generation of stars. Determining these physical properties will rely heavily on comparison with models and simulations tailored to the data. In this project, we propose to perform dedicated hydrodynamical cosmological simulations to guide the interpretation of these complex data sets, allowing to extract at best their physical content. Close collaboration with observers involved in current and future high-z galaxy surveys with JWST is envisaged.