Bengaluru Astronomers Challenge Major Findings on Early Star Formation Post the Big Bang
SARAS 3 radio telescope refutes the recent claim of the discovery of a radio wave signal from cosmic dawn.
(PIB India/Twitter; WikiImage/Pixabay/Via Canva)
The birth of our universe is pegged at a date about 13.7 billion years ago, when an extremely compressed, dense and microscopic point called ‘singularity’ blew up in all directions. It is believed that the remains of that massive explosion eventually gave rise to the cosmic matter that makes up the observable universe.
This theory regarding the origin of the universe, known as the Big Bang, has been around for a while now. And almost all cosmologists and theoretical physicists around the globe have gotten pretty comfortable with this idea.
However, there remains a gap in our universe’s interminable history, and a team of bright Indian astronomers might succeed in filling it!
The cosmic dawn
In 2018, researchers from Arizona State University and MIT announced that they had tracked down the “cosmic dawn”. In other words, they detected faint radio signals from the first stars that suggested that the universe was lifted out of total darkness 180 million years after the Big Bang.
This concept of cosmic dawn had a pretty significant role in reinstating the belief that astrophysicists had in the present cosmological model of the universe — the Big Bang.
But recently, astronomers from the Raman Research Institute (RRI) challenged the claims made by American astronomers. After working for close to four years inventing and building SARAS 3 radio telescope, they were able to use it to refute the ASU-MIT findings.
The SARAS 3 radio telescope
The SARAS 3 radio telescope is extra special because it is the first device in the world to reach the required sensitivity and conclusively refute the aforementioned ASU-MIT findings.
The project of designing and building such a precision radio telescope, which can detect extremely faint radio wave signals, was undertaken by Prof Ravi Subrahmanyan and Prof N Udaya Shankar.
The telescope comes with the ability to detect the faintest of cosmic signals, like the radiation generated by hydrogen atoms at a wavelength of 21 cm emitted from the cosmos’ depths.
Earlier versions of SARAS had been deployed initially at Timbaktu collective in Anantapur and subsequently in Ladakh, explained Dr Saurabh Singh, a research scientist at RRI who led the data analysis.
Moment of truth
For this study, the SARAS 3 was floated on Dandiganahalli Lake and Sharavati backwaters in North Karnataka for data collection. However, the telescope did not find any evidence of the signal that ASU/MIT researchers had claimed to detect.
“The presence of the signal was rejected after a careful assessment of the measurement uncertainties. The findings further implied that the detection of ASU/MIT researchers was likely contamination of their measurement and not a signal from the depths of space and time,” Dr Singh told The Deccan Herald.
Astronomers remain uncertain of what the actual signal looks like. But the SARAS 3 is now set to unravel the true nature of the cosmic dawn, and the team at RRI is planning more observations on remote lakes in India.
These expeditions could help scientists detect the 21-cm signal from the cosmic dawn and uncover the last remaining gap in the history of the universe.
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