NASA GSFC - 29 April 2010
Probe to Explore Big Bang's BurstSophisticated new technologies created by NASA and university scientists are enabling them to build an instrument designed to probe the first moments of the universe's existence.
Former NASA scientist Chuck Bennett, now an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Md., won a $5-million National Science Foundation grant to build a new ground-based instrument, the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS). Bennett is building CLASS with his collaborators at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Goddard will provide most of the instrument’s sophisticated detectors and other state-of-the-art technologies that will allow the scientists to test the "inflation theory" of the universe's origin.
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CLASS is not the only effort aimed at finding the same telltale evidence. Another Goddard team is now building a balloon-based instrument, the Primordial Inflation Polarization Exploration (PIPER) that Principal Investigator Al Kogut hopes to launch in 2012. "CLASS and PIPER are perfect partners," said Goddard scientist Ed Wollack, who is involved in the CLASS project. "They share many technologies while spanning a wide frequency range. They will do great science while demonstrating the technologies for a space mission."
Although both CLASS and PIPER are looking for the same polarization signature, they will approach the challenge using different detector technologies to study different microwave frequencies. Both detector technologies were developed at Goddard.
"The more frequencies you study, the better your chance of detecting the pattern of inflation," said David Chuss, a Goddard scientist working on CLASS.
Discovery Space News - 02 April 2010
JHU astrophysicist and team win $5 million stimulus grant to build telescopeWhat exactly happened at the beginning of time? A new probe may uncover the answer.
How did the universe blossom from an infinitesimally small speck to astronomical proportions in its first trillionth second of existence? While scientists are still debating the answer to that question, a new probe should provide the first direct evidence that the metamorphosis did indeed happen as theories predict.
- A new probe will analyze radiation generated by the birth of the universe.
- The project will require several years of observations.
- The research could explain what happened in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Once operational, the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) will scan relic radiation left over from the universe's creation 13.75 billion years ago for a unique pattern of polarization -- a consequence, scientists believe, of gravitational waves caused by the universe's expansion that ripple through space.
PhysOrg Astronomy - 15 March 2010
A team led by Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Charles L. Bennett has won a $5 million National Science Foundation grant - administered through the federal stimulus package - to build an instrument to probe what happened during the universe's first trillionth of a second, when it suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in far less than time than it takes to blink your eye.
The instrument, which is expected to require five years to build, will have the capability to measure the "cosmic microwave background radiation" over large swaths of the sky ...
Called the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor, or CLASS, the new instrument is expected to search the microwave sky for a unique polarization pattern, predicted to have arisen in the infant universe. More specifically, the telescope will help researchers determine the veracity of a theory called "inflation," which posits that the universe expanded from infinitesimal to astronomical in size in an astonishingly short time.