Canadian Telescope Measures Hydrogen Glow in Major Mapping Milestone
Located near Penticton, British Columbia, and hosted by the National Research Council of Canada, CHIME maps the entire northern sky daily. The telescope was originally designed to investigate dark energy—the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the universe—by tracking how hydrogen gas is distributed across space. By relying on its own independent data collection, CHIME offers researchers a faster, more cost-effective method to probe cosmic evolution compared to traditional optical galaxy surveys.
Isolating the faint signal required advanced data analysis techniques to filter out background cosmic noise, human technology, and instrumental interference, followed by over a year of rigorous testing on observations gathered during 94 nights in 2019. The resulting measurement showed that about two per cent of the universe's hydrogen was in neutral atomic form during that era.
Because the current milestone relies on only a small fraction of the data collected since the facility began operations, scientists are now working to expand their analysis to include nearly seven years of accumulated observations, aiming to peer even further back into cosmic history.
