New mission to find when the first stars were formed
"
India, which is among the 12 members of SKAO, "will contribute to the observatory in terms of developing management and control systems, science data processing, and signal processing systems," Choudhury said.
The telescopes will observe the specific radio wave emitted by hydrogen atoms. "It is referred to as the 21 cm line. The radio wave from the early universe will trace the hydrogen atoms, while around the time of formation of stars and galaxies, these atoms will deplete due to ionisation.
So, we can tell when the first stars in the universe formed by observing features in the 21 cm line of hydrogen," he said.
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The telescopes are being set up at radio-quiet sites in the deserts of South Africa and Australia.
Scientists are also trying to revive the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Bharat mission to study the origin of the universe.
"We have initiated talks with Isro for this space mission. Its objective is to detect the primordial gravitational waves emitted from the early universe.
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It will be a multinational project involving the European Space Agency and Nasa," said Tarun Sauradeep, lead scientist of the CMB Bharat mission and director of the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru.
T
he project, tentatively named ECHO (Exploring Cosmic History and Origin), aims to place a payload at L2 (Lagrange point), which will be around 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth for a clear view of deep space.
Professor L Sriramkumar of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and Professor K G Arun of Chennai Mathematical Institute also spoke at Cosmic Connections, a national-level meet for which 100 cosmologists from around the country gathered at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc).
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