NASA would place a giant telescope at the far end of the Moon

It is the universe it constantly conveys its history to us. For example: information about what happened long ago, long recently recorded on long radio waves everywhere in the universe, it is likely that the details of how the first stars and black holes were formed. There is a problem, however. Because of the noisy radio signals created by modern society, we cannot read them from Earth.

That’s why NASA is beginning to plan what it would take to build an automated telescope at the far end of the moon. One of the most ambitious proposals would be to build it Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, the largest (many) open radio telescope dish in the universe. Another couple of projects, called FarSide and FarView, would deploy numerous antennas — more than 100,000 in the end, many built on the moon itself and made of surface materials — to receive signals. The projects are part of NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which provides grants to innovators and entrepreneurs to advance radical ideas with the goal of creating advanced aerospace concepts. Although still hypothetical, and a few years from reality, the findings of these projects may reshape the cosmological model of our universe.

“With the telescopes we have on the moon, we can reverse-engineer the radio spectra we record and first deduce the properties of the first stars,” said Jack Burns, a cosmologist at Colorado Boulder University and a leading researcher and researcher for both FarSide and FarView. “We take care of those first stars because we take care of our origin, that is, where do we come from? Where did the Sun come from? Where did the Earth come from? The Milky Way?”

The answers to these questions come from a dark moment in the universe about 13.7 billion years ago.

When the universe cooled about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the first atoms, neutral hydrogen, released their photons in an exploded electromagnetic radiation that scientists can see today. This cosmic microwave background, or CMB, was first detected in 1964. Today, scientists use complex tools to detect incidents like the European Space Agency’s Planck probe, which creates a picture of the distribution of matter and energy in the young universe. Scientists could advance about a hundred million years to study the first stars about 13 billion years ago, or “Cosmic Dawn,” thanks to visual data from telescopes like Hubble (and soon an upgraded version of James Webb). They allow us to see that we are literally looking to the past so far.

After the initial Big Bang fireball was extinguished to the CMB, but before the first stars began to burn, there was a time when almost no light was emitted in the universe. Scientists call this time of no visible light or infrared “Cosmic Dark Age.” At this time, the universe is likely to be very simple, mostly composed of neutral hydrogen, photons, and dark matter. Evidence of what happened at this time can help us understand dark matter and dark energy (which, according to our good inventions, make up about 95 percent of the mass of the universe), but they are largely invisible to us and not yet understood. – he shaped his formation.

There are traces of what happened in the cosmic dark ages, hidden in hydrogen, which makes up most of the matter known in the universe. Each time the rotation of the electrons of the atom of a hydrogen is reversed, it emits a radio wave at a certain wavelength: 21 centimeters. But these wavelengths released in the Cosmic Dark Age are not 21 centimeters long by the time they reach Earth. As the universe expands rapidly, hydrogen wavelengths also expand, or “redshift,” as they travel long distances. This works as the time stamp of each wave: the longer the wave, the older it is. They are ten or 100 meters long by the time they reach the ground, with frequencies below the FM band.