I What's left to see of the early Universe?

[SimplePrimate]

In the detection of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation I understand there's still some low frequency radio astronomy left to do before hitting the 'opaque universe' boundary where/when light could not propagate. What, if anything, can we still hope see?

 

[.Scott]

The James Webb Telescope will allow us to see better up to the limit and Gravitational Wave detectors such as LIGO will let us look through it. We are looking to see as far back in time as we can. And I don't think we will run out of things to discover in any of our life times.

 

[phyzguy]

I think what you are referring to is the following. There is a period after the emission of the CMB, and before the formation of the first stars, that is referred to as the "dark ages". During this time the universe was filled with cooling neutral hydrogen gas, with some helium as well. It is possible to probe this time by looking at the hydrogen 21cm line with low frequency radio telescopes. There are a number of efforts trying to do that, such as DARE, LOFAR, and others.

As to what we hope to see, ideally we can probe the density fluctuations of the universe as it expanded, and see if they agree with existing models.

 

[JimJCW]

In the detection of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation I understand there's still some low frequency radio astronomy left to do before hitting the 'opaque universe' boundary where/when light could not propagate. What, if anything, can we still hope see?

The following topics might be interesting:

Cosmic neutrino background

Lines in the cosmic microwave background spectrum from the epoch of cosmological hydrogen recombination