Canada installs the final piece of Chime space telescope

A massive new ‘half-pipe’ radio telescope in Canada could soon help scientists to unravel some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Dubbed the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (Chime), the telescope contains four 100-meter-long (328 foot) U-shaped cylinders, allowing it to detect signals from when the universe was between 6 and 11 billion years old.

Researchers installed the final piece this week, bringing them one step closer to creating a 3D map of the universe, to explore dark energy and the mysterious fast radio bursts coming from distant galaxies.

Dubbed the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (Chime), the telescope contains four 100-meter-long (328 foot) U-shaped cylinders tha tresemble a skateboard half-pipe, allowing it to detect signals from when the universe was 6-11 billion years old

CHIME TELESCOPE

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (Chime) contains four 100-meter-long (328 foot) U-shaped cylinders, allowing it to detect signals from when the universe was between 6 and 11 billion years old.

With its U-shaped cylinders made of metal mesh, the experts have compared it to the half-pipes used by snowboarders and skateboarders.

Its unique design, coupled with advanced computing power, will serve as a ‘time machine’ to peer deep into the history of the universe.

The Chime telescope will collect radio waves with wavelengths between 37 and 75 centimeters.

Most of these signals come from the Milky Way, but, some began their journey billions of years ago.

The telescope will receive a massive amount of data, with a rate equivalent to all the data in the world’s mobile network.

And, seven quadrillion computer operations will occur every second.

‘With the Chime telescope we will measure the expansion history of the universe and we expect to further our understanding of the mysterious dark energy that drives the expansion ever faster,’ said Dr Mark Halpern, of the University of British Columbia.

‘This is a fundamental part of physics that we don’t understand and it’s a deep mystery.

‘This is about better understanding how the universe began and what lies ahead.’

The $16 million Chime telescope sits in the mountains of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley at the NRC’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton.

With its U-shaped cylinders made of metal mesh, it resembles the half-pipes used by snowboarders and skateboarders.

The massive instrument is equal in size to five NHL hockey rinks.

Its unique design, coupled with advanced computing power, will serve as a ‘time machine’ to peer deep into the history of the universe.

This could help scientists to better understand the history of the universe, mysterious fast radio bursts, and the detection of gravitational waves.

‘Chime’s unique design will enable us to tackle one of the most puzzling new areas of astrophysics today – Fast Radio Bursts,’ said Dr Victoria Kaspi, McGill University.

FAST RADIO BURSTS

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

The first FRB was spotted, or rather ‘heard’ by radio telescopes, back in 2007.

But it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to agree it wasn’t a glitch in one of the telescope’s instruments.

‘The origin of these bizarre extragalactic events is presently a mystery, with only two dozen reported since their discovery a decade ago.

‘Chime is likely to detect many of these objects every day, providing a massive treasure trove of data that will put Canada at the forefront of this research.’

The Chime telescope will collect radio waves with wavelengths between 37 and 75 centimeters.

This, according to the researchers, is similar to that used by cell phones, and will allow the telescope to pick up on extremely weak radio signals from the universe.

Most of these signals come from the Milky Way, but, some began their journey billions of years ago.

The telescope will receive a massive amount of data, with a rate equivalent to all the data in the world’s mobile network.

WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?

Dark energy is a phrase used by physicists to describe a mysterious ‘something’ that is causing unusual things to happen in the universe.

‘The universe is not only expanding, but it is expanding faster and faster as time goes by,’ Dr Kathy Romer, scientist at the Dark Energy Survey told MailOnline.

‘What we’d expect is that the expansion would get slower and slower as time goes by, because it has been nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang.’

Coming up with an equation of state would give the researchers clues about what is making up this mysterious force.

At the moment the favourite candidate is called the ‘cosmological constant’ – which has a relatively boring equation of state.

‘But, despite its simplicity, the cosmological constant is not the ‘something’ that scientists are hoping for,’ Dr Romer said, ‘a cosmological constant then messes up other parts of physics.’

‘It’s like a table plan at a wedding: You think you’ve got it all sorted out and then you notice that, because the caterers gave you a round table instead of a long one, your Dad is now going to be sitting next to your Mum’s new boyfriend.’

And, seven quadrillion computer operations will occur every second.

‘Chime “sees” in a fundamentally different way from other telescopes,’ Dr Keith Vanderlinde, University of Toronto.

‘A massive supercomputer is used to process incoming radio light and digitally piece together and image of the radio sky.

‘All that computing power also lets us do things that were previously impossible: we can look in many directions at once, run several experiments in parallel, and leverage the power of this new instrument in unprecedented ways.’

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk