HERA doubles down on sensitivity to unlock the secrets of the early universe
February 8, 2023
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The latest data from HERA enhances cosmic dawn radiation research and tests theories of galaxy formation. An array of 350 radio telescopes in South Africa’s Karoo desert is
The latest data from HERA enhances cosmic dawn radiation research and tests theories of galaxy formation. An array of 350 radio telescopes in South Africa’s Karoo desert is on the verge of detecting the “cosmic dawn” when stars first flared up and galaxies formed after the Big Bang.
The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) team announced in a paper accepted for publication. Astrophysical Journal They doubled the sensitivity of the array, currently the world’s most sensitive radio telescope, designed to study this unique period in the history of the universe.
While they have yet to detect radio emission from the end of the cosmic dark ages, their results provide clues about the composition of stars and galaxies in the early universe. Their data specifically shows that, unlike our present-day galaxies, early galaxies contained very few elements other than hydrogen and helium.
When the radio antennas are fully online and calibrated, ideally this fall, the team hopes to create a 3D map of ionized and neutral hydrogen bubbles that evolved from about 200 million years ago to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The map can tell us how the first stars and galaxies were different from what we see around us today, and what the universe looked like in its youth.
The Milky Way galaxy in the night sky above the HERA array. The telescope can only observe from April to September, when the Milky Way is below the horizon, because the galaxy produces a lot of radio noise, which prevents detection of weak radiation from the reionization period. The series is set in a radio-quiet area where radios, cell phones, and even petrol-powered cars are prohibited.
“This is a move towards a potentially revolutionary technique in cosmology. Once you’ve determined the precision you need, there’s a lot of information in the data,” said Joshua Dillon, a research fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Astronomy and lead author of the paper. map is a target for the next 50 years or more.”
Other telescopes also look into the early universe. The new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured an image of a galaxy that existed at the Big Bang, about 325 million years after the birth of the universe. However, JWST can only see the brightest galaxies formed during the Re-ionization Age; It is not the smaller but much larger number of dwarf galaxies whose stars heat the intergalactic medium and ionize most of the hydrogen gas.
HERA aims to detect emission from the neutral hydrogen that filled the space between these early stars and galaxies, and specifically to determine when this hydrogen stopped emitting or absorbing radio waves because it was ionized. The fact that the HERA team has yet to detect these ionized hydrogen bubbles in the cold waters of the cosmic dark age invalidates some theories about how stars evolved in the early universe. Source
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