[동포투데이] Canadian and Indian researchers, with the help of a large telescope in India, recently picked up a radio signal from a galaxy called “SDSSJ0826+5630”, located nearly 9 billion light-years from Earth. This is the first time radio signals like this have been detected from such a distance.
According to the foreign press, these radio signals will allow astronomers to go back in time and learn about the early universe. Scientists estimate that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old.
This is the first time such a radio signal has been picked up from such a distance, and the Royal Astronomical Society announced the groundbreaking achievement in its monthly notice.
Arnav Chakraborty, cosmologist and co-author of the radio-sensing study, said it looked back 8.8 billion years. However, this signal was not sent by extraterrestrials, but rather from a galaxy that formed only 4.9 billion years ago in space.
Chakraborty said that galaxies emit radio signals of various kinds, and so far we have only been able to pick up this particular signal in nearby galaxies, so our knowledge is limited to galaxies closer to Earth.
The detection of this signal is said to be a particularly important discovery, as it is a spectrum of electromagnetic waves with a frequency of 1,420, also called “hydrogen lines” at a specific wavelength, also called “21 cm lines”. Hydrogen can also be distributed throughout space to help map the galaxy, and the “21 cm line” is used for just that.
The researchers said ‘gravitational lensing’ is a naturally occurring phenomenon that amplifies signals from distant objects and helps them peer into the early universe.
Another galaxy is said to have bent the radio signal from ‘SDSSJ0826+5630’ and then amplified it so that a telescope in India could receive it.
