$40 million to establish early-universe observatory in Chile

[Judi Lynn]

$40 million to establish early-universe observatory in Chile

By Robert Sanders, Media relations | May 12, 2016

The Simons Foundation has given $38.4 million to establish a new astronomy facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert, adding new telescopes and new detectors to existing instruments in order to boost ongoing studies of the evolution of the universe, from its earliest moments to today. The Heising-Simons Foundation is providing an additional $1.7 million to support the project.

The Simons Observatory is a collaboration among Princeton University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, all of which are also providing financial support.

The observatory will allow scientists to probe the subtle properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation, in particular its polarization, to better understand what took place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. While these events are hidden from view behind the glare of the microwave radiation, the disturbances they caused in the fabric of spacetime affected the microwave’s polarization, and scientists hope to work backwards from these measurements to test theories about how the universe came into existence.

“A key target of this observatory is the earliest moments in the history of the universe,” said project spokesperson Mark Devlin, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is also a 1993 UC Berkeley Ph.D. and the leader of the Penn contingent at the Simons Observatory. “While patterns that we see in the microwave sky are a picture of the structure of the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang, we believe that some of these patterns were generated much earlier, by gravitational waves produced in the first moments of the universe’s expansion. By measuring how the gravitational waves affect electrons and matter 380,000 years after the big bang, we are observing fossils from the very, very early universe.”

More:
http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/05/12/40-million-to-establish-early-universe-observatory-in-chile/

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1. R&K for later reference. nt