MeerKAT telescope detects hydrogen from billions of years ago

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Astronomers have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to detect hydrogen gas billions of light-years away from us — from a period when the cosmos was billions of years younger than its current age of 13.8 billion years.

The research may provide astronomers with a new way of mapping the large-scale structure of the universe . The technique would rely on charting out where hydrogen, the universe's lightest and most abundant element, is located across the cosmos. It's known as hydrogen intensity mapping.

Neutral hydrogen emits a faint radio signal that astronomers call the 21-centimeter line. As the cosmos expands under the influence of dark energy , the wavelength of this radio signal is stretched, or " redshifted ." The extremity of the redshift allows astronomers to determine how long a particular signal has been travelling to us and thus what period of the universe the hydrogen that emitted it existed in.

Using the 21-centimeter line, hydrogen intensity mapping allows astronomers to trace radio emissions from hitherto unseen galaxies and build a 3D picture of the largest structures in the universe. Up until this point, however, this technique has relied on combining radio wave detection with observations from galactic surveys operating with visible light, or electromagnetic radiation our eyes have evolved to see.

This new research defies that trend, building a hydrogen intensity map using radio waves detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope , made up of 64 antennas in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa.

"This is a very exciting milestone," team leader Sourabh Paul said in a statement. "Hydrogen intensity mapping has long been seen as a promising way to map the universe efficiently, but the signal is extremely faint and difficult to isolate from foreground emission, human-made radio-frequency interference, and instrumental effects.

"Detecting it directly with MeerKAT shows that this technique is becoming a practical tool for cosmology."

Mapping with MeerKAT

The team behind this research analyzed around 96 hours of MeerKAT observations, finding signals from hydrogen dating back 4 billion to 5 billion years. This hydrogen spans distances of many million light-years, similar to the distance between the Milky Way and our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda .

The achievement represents a step forward in the usefulness of hydrogen mapping.

"Neutral hydrogen is one of the key ingredients for understanding how galaxies form and evolve," team member Zhaoting Chen of the University of Edinburgh said in the statement. "With intensity mapping, we do not need to detect every individual galaxy. Instead, we can measure the collective signal from hydrogen across large cosmic volumes, giving us a new way to study both galaxy evolution and the underlying matter distribution of the universe."

Future cosmological surveys could greatly benefit from the advancement of hydrogen mapping. This will be a major factor when the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), currently under construction in the Murchison region of Western Australia and the Karoo region of South Africa.

An overhead view of South Africa's MeerKAT radio-telescope array. (Image credit: SKA South Africa) "MeerKAT continues to open new windows for cosmology," team member Laura Wolz of the University of Manchester in the U.K. said in the statement. "The fact that this signal can be extracted from observations that were not originally designed for hydrogen intensity mapping is very encouraging. It shows the enormous scientific value of MeerKAT data and points the way to future observations with SKAO."

The team will now focus on collecting further observations with MeerKAT that cover larger areas of the sky over longer periods of time. This should provide astronomers with even more detailed hydrogen maps that could, in time, help understand how the largest structures in the cosmos took shape over the course of billions of years.

"This was a challenging data analysis process, requiring a detailed understanding of the many sources of contamination that can affect such a faint measurement," team member Mario G. Santos of the University of the Western Cape, Australia, said in the statement. "It is particularly remarkable that the data used in this study were taken in 2018, when MeerKAT had only just started science operations.

"There is now a rich trove of MeerKAT data waiting to be explored with this method."

The team's research was published in the July edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters .