Astronomers Hear the Faint Whispers of Cosmic Hydrogen from the Distant Past.

Astronomers Hear the Faint Whispers of Cosmic Hydrogen from the Distant Past.

Astronomers have directly detected an extremely faint radio signal from hydrogen gas billions of light years away, demonstrating a powerful new way to map the Universe.

Astronomers Hear the Faint Whispers of Cosmic Hydrogen from the Distant Past

The MeerKAT radio telescope, composed of 64 dish antennas located in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, was built to study cosmic hydrogen, galaxy formation and evolution, and transient radio sources. As the precursor to the planned Square Kilometer Array telescope, its scientific goal is to map the radio sky in preparation for more ambitious campaigns […]

Cosmic hydrogen from 5 billion light-years was hidden in MeerKAT data since 2018

South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope achieved the first direct detection of cosmic hydrogen intensity mapping without an optical galaxy catalog, pulling the signal entirely from 96 hours of archival radio data and hearing the universe as it sounded nine billion years ago.