The biggest radio telescope is already in the works and will soon be operational. According to a new report, it could help astronomers study dark matter.
Radio Telescope For Dark Matter
Dark matter, a mysterious element that accounts for around 85% of the universe's stuff, has long been hypothesized to have significantly influenced early galaxies' formation. However, dark matter's nature is still unclear because it doesn't interact with light like "normal" matter does when it forms stars, planets, and people. Therefore, cosmological models remain unclear about the specific role it played as galaxies first started to form.
Scientists from Northeastern University in China and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) have proposed a novel probe to study this mystery and shed insight into the properties of dark matter and the early genesis of galaxies, Space.com reported.
The team behind the new work believes that determining the 21-cm forest's energy distribution, or its "power spectrum," will make it a feasible probe to simultaneously determine the temperature history of the universe and the properties of dark matter.
This may make it easier for scientists to distinguish between a cold dark matter model of the universe, which has dark matter particles that are heavy and move slowly relative to the speed of light, and a hot dark matter model, which has lighter and faster-moving dark matter particles.
According to Yidong Xu, corresponding author of the new study and researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories, measuring the one-dimensional power spectrum of the 21-cm forest will not only increase the sensitivity of the probe and make it more practical but will also allow researchers to distinguish between the effects of warm dark matter models and early heating processes. We'll be able to accomplish two goals at once!
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will soon be the largest radio telescope in the world, started construction between Australia and South Africa in December 2022. This means it may soon be possible to find and utilize the 21-cm forest.
The low-frequency capabilities of phase 1 of SKA operations should allow researchers to limit the mass of dark matter particles and gas temperature, so long as cosmic heating isn't too intense during cosmic dawn. If cosmic heating were excessive, the SKA's second phase would involve enlarging the instrument and using numerous background radio sources to provide the same limitations.
The next step in this research is to find more radio-bright sources during the cosmic dawn, including more radio-loud quasars and the afterglow of gamma-ray bursts, as the potential use of the 21-cm forest as a dark matter probe is tied to observations of high-redshift background radio sources.
Astronomers can follow up on these sources after SKA starts surveying the cosmos in 2027, shedding more insight into the mysteries of dark matter and the very first galaxies.
ESA's Euclid Mission to Study Dark Energy
The NASA-donated infrared detectors will be used by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid Mission to gain a new understanding of the physical characteristics of dark matter and dark energy. The 1.2-meter telescope project will have some of the answers, but it will also likely yield a wealth of fresh data for theorists to think about.
In a previous report from Science Times, Euclid had a cosmic structure at enormous scales during the past 10 billion years. It will concurrently image 1.5 billion galaxies with a resolution similar to the Hubble Space Telescope and gather spectroscopic redshift data on 50 million galaxies.
Assuming a regular launch in July, Euclid's standard six-year science mission will begin in December from L2, a gravitationally stable Earth-Sun point around a million kilometers from Earth. The area of the sky that Euclid will cover is 15,000 square degrees. It will provide an enormous atlas with excellent resolution in the visible and near-infrared ranges.
According to Jason Rhodes, an observational cosmologist at NASA JPL and the science lead for Euclid, studies into dark energy are statistical. The findings may be distorted if there is only a slight systematic offset to such shapes or distances. This inspired them to do these observations above Earth's atmosphere using a satellite telescope.
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