The Moon’s Dark Ages of Astronomy
NASA recently has selected a MIT-lead team in order to develop plans for “an array of radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.” The exciting part about the whole thing is that the telescopes will probe the earliest formation of the basic structures of the universe, the so-called “Dark Ages” of the greatest unknown realms of astronomy.
The study will be near the beginning of the universe when the stars, star clusters, and galaxies were first formed and came into existence. Developing shortly after the Big Bang, the period followed very closely the time when cosmic background radiation filled every aspect of space. Already mapped out using satellites, this area is considered very important to understanding how the earliest universal structures developed.
Jacqueline Hewitt, head of the Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) project, is also a professor of physics and director of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Science. Planned as a huge array of hundreds of telescope modules that were specially designed to pick-up very low frequency radio emissions, it will cover an area of up to two square kilometers. Automated vehicles will move the modules into place on the moon.
It is completely impossible to observe any of the cosmic Dark Ages from Earth, mainly because of the two major sources of interference that prevent or interference with the low-frequency radio emissions–one is the ionosphere of Earth and the other is Earth’s radio and television transmissions. The ionesphere is a high-altitude layer of electrically charged gas, and the other produces background interference everywhere on the surface of Earth.
Believe it or not, the only place safe from these interferences is the far side of the moon, where terrestrial radio transmissions never reach it as it faces away from the Earth. With these telescopes the easiest to build, they will also be able detect the long wavelengths of the radio waves because it does not require any accurate placement or alignment of individual components. The telescopes will also not be detected by lunar dust, and it will not matter if some of the antennas quit.
But these lunar telescopes will add to the low-frequency radio telescope array that is presently under construction in Western Australia. Also including MIT researchers, this one will be limited to the upper reaches of the low-frequency radio spectrum, being able to penetrate only into a portion of the cosmic Dark Ages.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
