The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has achieved a significant milestone by detecting extremely faint radio emissions from hydrogen gas in the distant universe using observations from its own facility. This accomplishment demonstrates a new technique for studying cosmic expansion and provides researchers with an independent method to investigate dark energy, the mysterious force believed to drive the acceleration of the universe’s expansion.
CHIME is a radio telescope situated near Penticton, British Columbia, and operated by the National Research Council of Canada. The facility surveys the northern sky daily and represents a collaborative effort involving researchers from Canadian universities including the University of British Columbia, McGill University, and the University of Toronto, as well as North American partners such as Arizona State University. Previously, scientists had to supplement CHIME’s radio observations with data from galaxy surveys collected by other telescopes, a process that involved significantly higher costs and more limited scope.
The newly demonstrated capability allows CHIME to measure radio emissions directly from hydrogen atoms across vast regions of the universe, extending observations deeper into cosmic history than traditional galaxy surveys. By tracking how hydrogen was distributed throughout the universe at different epochs, researchers can reconstruct the universe’s expansion rate over time and test competing theories about dark energy. The hydrogen signal detected in this study originated from approximately 5 billion years ago, based on analysis of data collected during 94 nights of observations in 2019.
Extracting the hydrogen signal required development of new data processing and analysis techniques to isolate the extremely weak emissions from stronger sources of interference, including cosmic radio noise, human-made signals, and instrumental effects. The research team invested more than a year validating the results to ensure the detected signal genuinely represented hydrogen from the distant universe. With nearly seven years of observations now available for analysis, researchers plan to extend this technique to study even earlier periods of cosmic history, potentially reaching back to when the universe was approximately three billion years old.
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