Looking at the Universe’s dark ages from the far side of the Moon

There is a signal, born in the earliest days of the cosmos. It’s weak. It’s faint. It can barely register on even the most sensitive of instruments. But it contains a wealth of information about the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, and the mysteries of the origins of the largest structures in the Universe. Despite decades of searching for this signal, astronomers have yet to find it. The problem is that our Earth is too noisy, making it nearly impossible to capture this whisper. The solution is to go to the far side of the Moon, using its bulk to shield our sensitive instruments from the cacophony of our planet. Building telescopes on the far side of the Moon would be the greatest astronomical challenge ever considered by humanity. And it would be worth it. The science We have been scanning and mapping the wider cosmos for a century now, ever since Edwin Hubble discovered that the Andromeda “nebula” is actually a galaxy sitting 2.5 million light-years away. Our pow ... Read full article.