The Exciting New HIRAX Project Will Allow Scientists To Learn More About Dark Energy And Fast Radio Bursts
South Africa is swiftly becoming a very important place for astronomy with its Square Kilometre Array (SKA), and now an exciting new project known as HIRAX is going to allow scientists to learn even more about dark energy and fast radio bursts.
The Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) project will be run by researchers from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, but the project will be a highly collaborative effort with numerous scientists involved from around the world, as Phys.org reported.
Professor Kavilan Moodley explained that HIRAX will be an interferometer array that will consist of 1,024 dishes and will provide the same kind of resolution that could be expected from an enormous telescope.
“It’s an interferometer array that will be made up of 1,024 6-meter dishes. Interferometer arrays are really cool because they combine signals from many telescopes to provide the resolution of a larger telescope.”
Scientists are planning to use HIRAX so that they can finally learn how dark energy first formed, a task that will be accomplished by observing neutral hydrogen gas and then tracking it in galaxies. The second plan for HIRAX will be to finally understand the phenomenon of fast radio bursts.
According to Professor Moodley, HIRAX will be able to learn a phenomenal amount about dark energy through the process of studying baryon acoustic oscillations, and this is very helpful as dark energy is currently causing the universe to expand at an increasingly fast rate.
“HIRAX can study it using a unique cosmic ruler provided by nature, called baryon acoustic oscillations. These were generated in the very early universe, which was a hot and dense soup of particles and light. Small irregularities gave rise to sound waves in this primordial soup.”
New telescope was yesterday unveiled, will be built at the SKA South Africa site in the Karoo. The Hydrogen Intensity & Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) project is an international collaboration being led by scientists.What will HIRAX do & how? Click https://t.co/iRuGVmeUsj
— Next Einstein Forum (@NextEinsteinFor) August 18, 2018
These sound waves once held matter in them until the point when the separation of matter and light occurred, at which point the matter was then placed in a pattern. To understand the matter distribution of the universe, scientists can look at neutral hydrogen gas, which has a signal of 1,420 MHz. Moodley stated that this is “the range of frequencies used by cellular networks and UHF television channels; the signal gets stretched to lower frequencies as the universe expands.”
HIRAX will be running in an area that will be between 400 and 800 MHz, and this will make it easier to detect neutral hydrogen gas from seven to 11 billion years ago.
Fast radio bursts are another mysterious phenomenon that HIRAX will be looking into. Scientists still do not know how these are created, and studying them so far has proven to be a cumbersome task as they are so quick, and the vast majority of telescopes only analyze very tiny sections of space.
According to Professor Moodley, HIRAX will be able to study much larger spaces of the sky, which means that it is that much more likely to catch these fast radio bursts when they occur.
“HIRAX’s large field of view will allow it to observe large portions of sky daily – so when the flashes happen, the instrument will be more likely to see them. We expect that it’ll see up to a dozen of these flashes a day; to put that in perspective, only a few dozen in total have ever been observed.”
Moodley also explained that the instrument would be “working with several other Southern African countries to build 8-dish outrigger arrays. These, in combination with the main array, will help localize these bursts to within their hosting galaxies.”
With South Africa’s new HIRAX project up and running, scientists may finally be able to crack the mystery of dark energy and fast radio bursts.
