Astronomers have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to detect hydrogen gas billions of light-years away from us — from a period when the cosmos was billions of years younger than its current age of 13.8 billion years.
The research may provide astronomers with a new way of mapping the large-scale structure of the universe. The technique would rely on charting out where hydrogen, the universe's lightest and most abundant element, is located across the cosmos. It's known as hydrogen intensity mapping.
Neutral hydrogen emits a faint radio signal that astronomers call the 21-centimeter line. As the cosmos expands under the influence of dark energy, the wavelength of this radio signal is stretched, or "redshifted." The extremity of the redshift allows astronomers to determine how long a particular signal has been travelling to us and thus ...
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