Call it what you will. An artificial forest. A hide-and-seek campground. A scientific laboratory. Maybe even Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array. Exciting discoveries are taking place here in Owens Valley. A large array of radio telescopes, designed in the shape of trees, lay scattered across the desert floor, making it look just like a dry forest, artificially. Of course, it would be nice to play a game of hide-and-seek there, hiding between 288 distinct radio antennas under the warm sun. However, that is not where the excitement lies in the students and faculty of the California Institute of Technology, hoping to get a glimpse of how the universe evolved during a period known as the Cosmic Dawn.
Bang! In that instant, the universe expanded from a hot, infinitely dense object. Intense heat and …show more content…
Couldn’t we just study our Sun and the Milky Way, since we are literally sitting right in its system? Well, no. Light, along with other waves, travel in a set speed in a vacuum, a place with no pressure to affect the speed. And since space is a vacuum, these waves travel in a set speed, namely the speed of light: 3.0*108 meters per second. According to Michael Eastwood, a fifth year PhD student studying the Cosmic Dawn, “if you observe an object that is so far away that the light took one billion years to reach you, than you are observing the object as it was one billion years ago.” Thus, the light we collect from stars are older than they actually are, giving us the ability to study earlier stages of the universe. However, the stars and galaxies from this age are extremely hard to study through Optical telescopes (e.g. the use of the star’s light). Instead, Mr. Eastwood and his band of researchers at the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array (LWA) intends on studying these structures through Radio antennas, a difficult, yet possible, process to answer some of our greatest questions in the formation of the
Bang! In that instant, the universe expanded from a hot, infinitely dense object. Intense heat and …show more content…
Couldn’t we just study our Sun and the Milky Way, since we are literally sitting right in its system? Well, no. Light, along with other waves, travel in a set speed in a vacuum, a place with no pressure to affect the speed. And since space is a vacuum, these waves travel in a set speed, namely the speed of light: 3.0*108 meters per second. According to Michael Eastwood, a fifth year PhD student studying the Cosmic Dawn, “if you observe an object that is so far away that the light took one billion years to reach you, than you are observing the object as it was one billion years ago.” Thus, the light we collect from stars are older than they actually are, giving us the ability to study earlier stages of the universe. However, the stars and galaxies from this age are extremely hard to study through Optical telescopes (e.g. the use of the star’s light). Instead, Mr. Eastwood and his band of researchers at the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array (LWA) intends on studying these structures through Radio antennas, a difficult, yet possible, process to answer some of our greatest questions in the formation of the