Cosmic Dawn

The Planet Hunting Machine

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 16:37:16 +0000

The Planet Hunting Machine Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2019 - 10:37

Po Bronson

From Alta: Sometime in the next decade, NASA hopes to deploy a rover to the dark side of the moon, where it will roll out 128 small, lightweight radio antennae in a flower configuration over 100 square kilometers of the lunar dirt. The FARSIDE project is designed to look for habitable planets in other solar systems.
But you can see it today, already in operation, here in California.

The Cosmic Dawn is happening again, so get your pressure suit on. To look for life “out there,” go visit Gregg Hallinan. He’s a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. And with about $70 worth of unleaded gas, you can drive from anywhere in the Golden State to his crisp-white shipping container in the Owens Valley and take a gander outside our solar system.

The Owens Valley is a spectacle of nature, and even more beautiful for being in the middle of nowhere. The Mammoth Mountain ski area looks down on it from the northwest. The 4,000-year-old bristlecone pines of the White Mountains do the same from the east. Los Angeles, to the south, still owns the valley floor, in order to suck the water its way (“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”). Locals from Bishop and Big Pine brag of the golden trout they catch in the rivers. It’s high desert, a xerophytic ecosystem fed by bajadas and alluvial fans that sprout next to nothing—bitterbrush, burrobush, buckwheat, creosote, and the occasional lizard or jackrabbit.

There’s a certain early-space-era design aesthetic that takes the breath away when you see it up close. At Caltech’s observatory in the Owens Valley, the 40 Meter radio telescope triggers that type of “drink your Tang” awe. The locals call it Big Ears. Nearly a million pounds of steel tubing and 14,000 square feet of aluminum paneling slathered in 1.5 tons of NASA-white paint can’t help but give you a 130-foot heartbeat. The 40 Meter has been in Hollywood films. It’s got movie star presence. Twice a week, it checks on about 1,800 blazars, which are jets of radioactive matter shooting at us from black holes. It has been the celebrity here for half a century. “The 40 Meter scope could pick up a cell phone on Pluto,” Mark Hodges, an OVRO design engineer, tells me. Read more...

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Physicists in Earth’s Remotest Corners Race to Reproduce ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Signal

Anonymous — Wed, 02 May 2018 18:29:28 +0000

Physicists in Earth’s Remotest Corners Race to Reproduce ‘Cosmic Dawn’ Signal Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/02/2018 - 12:29

Davide Castelvecchi

From Nature: Researchers are heading to some of the most remote spots on Earth — from the Tibetan Plateau to an island in the sub-Antarctic ocean — to try to capture an enigmatic radio signal from the early Universe. This grand search, which could even involve a mission to the Moon, includes some of the first experiments to follow up on a surprise announcement in February that astronomers had seen evidence of the Universe’s first stars lighting up, a moment known as the cosmic dawn. Read more...

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Illuminating the Cosmic Dawn with Sky-Average Radio Measurements

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 21:21:32 +0000

Illuminating the Cosmic Dawn with Sky-Average Radio Measurements Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/20/2018 - 15:21

Abstract: Obtaining direct measurements of the period when the first compact sources formed is one of the challenges of modern cosmology. At redshifts > 6, before and during the epoch of reionization (EoR), UV and X-ray radiation from the first galaxies and black holes altered the energy state of the neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) and imprinted features in the otherwise smooth evolution of the IGM's physical and spin temperatures. In this talk I will describe how we can use sky-average, or global, measurements of the low-frequency (< 200 MHz) radio sky to detect these features. Precise characterization of these features would enable us to derive properties of the galaxies and black holes through Cosmic Dawn and the EoR. The talk will focus on recent measurements and progress by the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR Signature (EDGES). EDGES measures the sky-average radio spectrum from the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia and is already placing exciting constraints on the properties of the first compact objects in the Universe.

February 2, 2018
Raul Monsalve

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