Date Time
Annual conference on new telescope moves science ahead
More than a hundred people gathered virtually at the end of April for the 2021 annual conference on the CCAT-prime project, which is building the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) in Chile. Despite pandemic challenges, telescope planning, development and construction continues, with “first light” now scheduled for 2023.
Mod-Cam receiver for the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope. CCAT Observatory, Inc.
FYST, a powerful, 6-meter-diameter telescope currently being assembled in Germany by Vertex Antennentechnik GmbH, will be installed at an elevation of 18,400 feet just below the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
January 12, 2021
New work agrees with older research suggesting the oldest light in the universe – from the most distant galaxy yet known – started its journey toward us 13.77 billion years ago.
View larger. | In 2013, the Planck space telescope released the most detailed map to date of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang. It was the mission’s first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380,000 years old. Now a new, independent study agrees with Planck’s results. That’s good news for astronomers trying to pin down the universe’s age and rate of expansion. Image via ESA.
Ideas, Inventions And Innovations
New View of Nature’s Oldest Light Suggest Universe Is 13.77 Billion Years Old
From an observatory high above Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe.
Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old – give or take 40 million years. A Cornell researcher co-authored one of two papers about the findings, which add a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community.
The new estimate, using data gathered at the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which measured remnants of the Big Bang from 2009 to ’13.