Aussie science homes in on secrets of life

If trying to hear someone whispering across a room full of people screaming their lungs out doesn't sound like fun, spare a thought for Christene Lynch. She and her colleagues at

Western Australia's Curtin University are searching for a 13 billion-year-old radio wave signal emitted by the first light in the universe. The post-doctoral research fellow says the

two challenges are kind of similar at least in theory. Although, the reason for undertaking the second might be slightly more involved. "Finding the weak signal of this first light will

help us understand how the early stars and galaxies formed," Dr Lynch says. In other words, it may be a step closer to understanding the birth of the heavens and, dare it be said, the

meaning of life. Essentially, her International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research team is attempting to reach back into what scientists call the Epoch of Re-ionisation or EoR. The faint

remnant of the outpouring of ionised hydrogen atoms began sometime between 500 million and one billion years after the Big Bang. Not only was it a hell of a long time ago, the

"background noise" disrupting attempts to home in on the elusive signal has until now been pretty much impossible to combat. Enter the Murchison Widefield Array, an inland radio

telescope 800 kilometres north of Perth. Equipment installed at the facility comprising multiple low-frequency "antenna tiles" have been used to help search for the EoR over the

past decade. However their number was recently doubled to 256, significantly upping the telescope's power. By combining some of the existing tiles with 56 of the new ones, Dr Lynch and

her crew have been able to run a new sky experiment, the Long Baseline Epoch of Re-ionisation Survey. "There are too many other radio sources that are much brighter than the EoR signal

lying between it and us," she said. "But by using the new tiles and thus expanding the physical area over which the antenna work we were able to reduce a lot of that interference.

"As more and more of the tiles are added in, we'll have a much better chance of finding the echo of that first light." They've so far surveyed more than 80,000 radio

signal sources, taking 16 spectral measurements for each. Running the results, they produced real and simulated models in which the noisiest foreground signals were reduced by a factor of

three. Curtain's Professor Cathryn Trott says the result is "our deepest and most detailed view to-date of the radio sky". "This new catalogue provides us with a cleaner

path to locating the EoR signal - a detection that will be a very major achievement for astronomy," she said. GET THE LATEST NEWS FROM THEWEST.COM.AU IN YOUR INBOX. Sign up for our

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