The Simons Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert is slated to be completed by mid-2024, inspiring a search for signs of primordial gravitational waves—the afterglow of the Big Bang—in the cosmic microwave background.
This next-generation cosmology experiment will be equipped with 50,000 light-collecting detectors, 10 times more than similar projects currently underway.
When the Universe began almost 14 billion years ago, it was filled with a hot plasma of particles and photons. For the first 380,000 years, photons constantly interacted with free electrons, making the early Universe as opaque as fog.
This fog then cleared, and as the Universe cooled, the temperature became too low, so photons were able to travel through the Universe, which eventually became mostly transparent.
It is this light that reaches us as background radiation, detectable in infrared and radio waves.
What makes the researchers’ work unique is that it sheds light on the entire framework of galaxies — the invisible dark matter that weaves the Universe together and connects all its components.
