Canada’s giant radio ear just heard the universe whisper without a translator. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) near Penticton, B.C., has made its first standalone detection of hydrogen’s faint glow from when the cosmos was about five billion years old — using only its own data.
UBC News reported the breakthrough (Alex Walls, Sept. 28), published in The Astrophysical Journal. CHIME — built by UBC, McGill, Toronto, the NRC’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, and collaborators — maps the northern sky every day. Until now, it had to cross-correlate with other telescopes’ galaxy surveys. Going solo opens a cheaper, faster path to study dark energy and cosmic expansion without hitchhiking on someone else’s catalog.
Co-author Dr. Shabbir Shaikh (Arizona State): roughly two percent of hydrogen was in neutral atomic form at that epoch, broadly consistent with other measurements. The signal came from 94 nights of 2019 observations, then more than a year of validation. Dr. Arnab Chakraborty (Toronto): “We worked very hard to convince ourselves that this wasn’t a false alarm… That gave us confidence we were seeing real hydrogen from the distant universe.” Principal investigator Dr. Mark Halpern (UBC) called it “a bold new step in the global cosmology program and a Canadian success story.”
Researchers already have nearly seven years of CHIME data and want to push the analysis back to when the universe was only three billion years old.
Sources: UBC News (Alex Walls)
Leave a Reply