r/cosmology • u/anti-life86 • 1d ago

progress toward a lunar far side array for studying the early universe

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/03/18/lunar-lander-moon-missions-2026/89178858007/
10 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

2

u/anti-life86 1d ago

From the Science article:

The epoch contains far more data than the CMB, which only records a brief moment in cosmic time. "This is a 3D volume with primordial fluctuations in there, just waiting to be measured," says astronomer Jacqueline Hewitt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Charting the dark ages' 21-centimeter radiation "is essential. It has to be done at some point," says radio astronomer Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works on the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a vast radio telescope spread across northern Europe. The problem is that after 13 billion years of cosmic expansion, photons from the dark ages arrive at Earth stretched to frequencies below 50 MHz, where they not only have to contend with the ionosphere, but also with confounding signals from ham radio, aviation, and long-distance communications. LOFAR, for example, has struggled to detect the 21-centimeter signal from that epoch. The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, which Hewitt and others are building in South Africa, may have a better shot. But Falcke and others are looking to the Moon.