A microsatellite the size of a small suitcase will listen to the earliest “whispers” of the universe to unravel one of cosmology's greatest mysteries: what actually happened in the universe before the first stars were born. The “CosmoCube” mission, led by the University of Cambridge in the UK and involving scientists from many countries, plans to use the back of the moon as a natural barrier to block all electromagnetic noise from the Earth, thus capturing the extremely weak signal emitted by hydrogen atoms in the early universe — the 21 cm line. This signal was generated during the transition period after the big explosion and before nuclear fusion lit up the first batch of stars, and has not been directly detected. The relevant paper was published in the latest issue of the journal “Nature Astronomy”.

A microsatellite the size of a small suitcase will listen to the earliest “whispers” of the universe to unravel one of cosmology's greatest mysteries: what actually happened in the universe before the first stars were born. The “CosmoCube” mission, led by the University of Cambridge in the UK and involving scientists from many countries, plans to use the back of the moon as a natural barrier to block all electromagnetic noise from the Earth, thus capturing the extremely weak signal emitted by hydrogen atoms in the early universe — the 21 cm line. This signal was generated during the transition period after the big explosion and before nuclear fusion lit up the first batch of stars, and has not been directly detected. The relevant paper was published in the latest issue of the journal “Nature Astronomy”.