The Future of Astronomy: Giant Radio Telescope Arrays
Ethan Siegel, SWaB!
By building bigger telescopes, going to space, and looking from ultraviolet to visible to infrared wavelengths, we can view stars and galaxies as far back as stars and galaxies go. But for millions of years in the Universe, there were no stars, no galaxies, nor anything that emitted visible light. Prior to that, the only light that existed was the leftover glow from the Big Bang, along with the neutral atoms created during the first few hundred thousand years. For those millions of years, there's simply never been a way to gather information from the electromagnetic part of the spectrum. But...
By building bigger telescopes, going to space, and looking from ultraviolet to visible to infrared wavelengths, we can view stars and galaxies as far back as stars and galaxies go. But for millions of years in the Universe, there were no stars, no galaxies, nor anything that emitted visible light. Prior to that, the only light that existed was the leftover glow from the Big Bang, along with the neutral atoms created during the first few hundred thousand years. For those millions of years, there's simply never been a way to gather information from the electromagnetic part of the spectrum. But...