Giant radio telescope in the Utah desert could reveal hidden corners of the cosmos — and brand-new physics
A gigantic range of radio dishes offered for the Utah desert could advance our understanding of physics and help us decode cosmic radio signals. Now scientists have described how it would work.
From the 1950s, astronomy radio opened a powerful view of the interior functioning of the universe, revealing everything, the way the stars are formed Incredible images of the gigantic black hole of our galaxy. Now astronomers build a gigantic range of radio dishes, called The Deep Synoptic Array 2000 (DSA-2000). The table consists of 2,000 radio dishes, each 16 feet (5 meters) in diameter, arranged in a radio part of the UTAH desert.
Now, an international team of astronomers has demonstrated how DSA-2000 will be a leading instrument to reveal some of the most hidden corners, particles and processes in the cosmos.
Because the DSA-24 will have both a large field of vision and a high resolution, it will be like The ultimate digital camera of the world But in radio frequencies, the team explained in a paper Downloaded on the Preprint Arxiv database in May. These capacities will allow the DSA-2000 to detect a wide variety of phenomena which are not possible with our current radiotelescopes.
And there are a lot of unexplored radio transmissions in the universe. For example, astronomers believe that the vast majority of the mass of each galaxy is in the form of dark matterAn invisible entity that has hitherto escaped direct detection.
A potential candidate for dark matter is called the axion, a million hypothetical particles of times lighter than the lightest known particles. Axions can collect dense objects such as neutron starsAnd under the influence of extremely strong magnetic fields (which the neutron stars have with a shovel), they can convert to photons with just the good frequency range that DSA-2000 could collect these signals.
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Another candidate for dark matter is called the Dark photonWhich is like our normal and familiar photons (clear particles) but… dark. Dark photons can also collect neutron stars, where they can be whipped in a frenzy due to the extreme rotation of the star. In a process called Superradiance, dark photons are stimulated to extremely high energies, where they start to resonate with regular photons, releaseing explosions of signals that could be directly detected by DSA 2000.
This means that the DSA-2000 could potentially offer our first direct overview of a new form of material in the universe. But that’s not all.
In 2023, astronomers with the Nanograv experience announced Detection of gravitational waves through pulsar synchronization tables. The DSA -2000 could go further by precisely measuring the rotation rates of approximately 3,000 pulsars – quickly turning neutron stars which pulse at regular intervals. This would allow the new instrument to find subtle variations in the towers of pulsars, such as those due to invisible orbit companions, such as black holes or small tufts of black matter.
Finally, the DSA -2000 could detect tens of thousands of rapid radio explodes (FRB) – huge explosions that manifest themselves in the form of bulops and bloops in the radio spectrum. This unprecedented number of detections would allow scientists to build a complete survey of the neighboring universe, which would help our understanding of everything, dark energy to the nature of ghostly particles called neutrinos.
The universe tries to whisper its secrets. All the answers are there, if we listen enough carefully.
