A 9-billion-year-old signal could help explain dark energy

A Canadian radio telescope has detected the faint glow of hydrogen from billions of years ago using only its own observations, proving a long-awaited way to map the distant universe can actually work. CHIME can use this hydrogen signal to trace how matter is spread across space and measure how the universe has expanded over time, offering a powerful new way to investigate dark energy. A 9-billion-year-old signal could help explain dark energy.

Com For the first time, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has demonstrated that it can detect the extremely faint radio glow of hydrogen gas from the distant universe using only its own observations. The result could give scientists a faster and less costly way to investigate dark energy, the still mysterious phenomenon believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. Understanding dark energy remains one of the biggest unresolved problems in modern physics.

The achievement is also an important milestone for CHIME, which was originally designed with this type of measurement in mind. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal. "Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and the raw material from which stars form," said co-author Dr.