A telescope from India known as the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) has detected a signal from deep space dating back 8.8 billion years. The signal corresponds to atomic hydrogen, the simplest and most widespread chemical element in the Universe. The signal is also the furthest of its kind ever discovered.
Just in case you feel too old already, you’d better keep in mind that the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Now seriously, the new discovery of the signal in question might allow astronomers to uncover more about a period when our Universe was a lot younger, as ScienceAlert reveals.
Nature helps astronomers again
The famous American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated as one of the arguments for the falsehood of religion that the Universe is constantly trying to kill us. And it’s difficult to contradict him since our world is teeming with natural disasters, diseases, poverty, corruption, and so on. But nature can also act in the opposite way, and it’s also the case for the discovery of the space signal by the Indian telescope.
If you’re asking yourself how that might be possible, feel free to check out what Nirupam Roy, an astrophysicist from the Indian Institute of Science, has to say:
Gravitational lensing magnifies the signal coming from a distant object to help us peer into the early universe. In this specific case, the signal is bent by the presence of another massive body, another galaxy, between the target and the observer. This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up
Hydrogen can be produced from diverse and domestic resources. We can consider, for that matter, biomass, fossil fuels, and water electrolysis. Hydrogen gas has the property of being extremely flammable, and there are three natural isotopes of the chemical element: deuterium, protium, and tritium.
The new findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
