In a country of a billion phones, hungry for every bit of radio signal, is a group of scientists looking for spots where one can escape them.
This continuing decade-long quest, led by scientists at the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru has taken them multiple times to Ladakh, and to a place aptly named the Timbuktu Collective in Andhra Pradesh, and to lakes in northern Karnataka, with their radio telescope SARAS, which hopes to catch the trace of an extremely elusive sign from space — that of the birth of the first stars or what’s called “the cosmic dawn”. Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb has remarked that the discovery of such a signal “would be worth two Nobel Prizes” because it would throw light on the structure of the universe in its infancy.
Reverberations of the Big Bang that birthed our universe 13.8 billion years continue to linger in a swathe of radiation called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). At a very specific region in this spectrum, current cosmological models of the universe say, there’s a point where the microwave radiation is a little dim and this, these models say, is because light from the first stars may have made hydrogen extra opaque at specific radio wavelengths.
