University of Colorado researchers are planning to put a satellite in orbit around the moon to observe what they call the universe’s “dark ages” — an era just 15 million to 30 million years after the Big Bang, before the first stars illuminated the cosmic dawn.
“What we’re doing is we’re really opening up a whole new window to the early universe that has never been explored before,” said Jack Burns, a CU professor of astrophysics and planetary science and also vice president emeritus for academic affairs and research at the university.
NASA recently selected the Dark Ages Polarimetry Pathfinder (DAPPER), to be led by Burns, as one of nine small satellite missions that are expected to launch as early as 2022 or 2023, according to Burns. The DAPPER team will devote the next six months coming up with a detailed design of the proposed mission, which has as its goal the detection of faint signals from the clouds of hydrogen gas that once filled the early cosmos.
“That’s a unique time period, where there’s a lot that is happening,” Burns said Wednesday. “The cores of stars are collapsing, and that will lead to the first black holes … There was not a lot of astrophysics; mainly, just cosmology and expanding universe.”
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