OKANAGAN FALLS, BC — In the wildlands of Canada's Okanagan Valley, scientists are listening to the whispers of space and time.
“Everything in the universe radiates,” said Michael Rupen, director of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, a collection of highly sensitive radio telescopes.
“The signals we're looking for astronomically are billions of times fainter than those from your cell phone,” said Rupen, “If you put your cell phone on the moon, that would be a strong source for us.”
Rupen and his team are straining to hear some of the faintest natural signals ever recorded. Engineers like Brent Carlson build instruments that listen for the crackle of distant stars and the yawn of the expanding universe.
“We crunch the data coming in from the antennas,” said Carlson.
They work in a windowless lab known as a Faraday Cage.
“In this room, any electromagnetic radiation from the computers and switching electronics and stuff doesn't interfere with the telescope,” Carlson said.
Every office in the complex has its own insulated box to shield even a basic laptop.
“And that cage will cost maybe five, six times as much as the actual computer,” Rupen said.
No TVs or microwave ovens here.
“We're relying on landlines,” said Rupen, “and we're relying on P.A. systems, rather than just picking up the phone and giving someone a call.”
The observatory was built far off the grid, in the heart of rattlesnake country.
“Shedded skin,” said University of British Columbia researcher Mark Halpern, holding a rattler’s discarded molt, “Very often there is a snake attached.”
Halpern braves the reptile invasion to work with the largest eye on the sky here, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME.
“Build a thing that solves a problem. That's what we've done,” said Halpern.
The massive array of steel frames, curved like Olympic halfpipes and stacked side-by-side, is peering billions of light years across the universe, listening for the faintest ripples of cosmic creation.
Halpern said, “Early signals in the universe moving out like sound waves.”
The CHIME telescope’s more than 2,000 detectors collect a massive volume of data, which is digitally correlated through a blizzard of calculations every second.
“Between five and ten times the world internet traffic,” said Halpern.
The result is, well, astronomical. They've discovered more "fast radio bursts," mysterious blasts of deep space energy, than anyone.
“We’ve seen 3 or 4,000. There were ten of these flashes known before we built this instrument,” Halpern explained, “and we had no idea when we built this instrument that that would be part of this story.
The biggest discoveries are often the ones scientists never see coming, which is why the middle of nowhere can be the most exciting workplace on Earth.
Rupen said, “People come, they love it, they stay forever.”
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