Telescopes to peer at dark corners of space

London: A new network of telescopes will let astronomers peer deeper into space than ever before, to see the first stars and galaxies being born.

A network of 77 devices which detect low-frequency radio signals dating from early in the life of the universe is being built across Europe.

Astronomers hope their observations will help them understand how stars and galaxies formed from the cloud of cool gas that made up the universe after the Big Bang.

The telescopes will also allow them to sweep large sections of the sky in a single night, increasing the chances of spotting previously unseen objects.

According to current theories, the Big Bang created a soup of primordial matter that gradually cooled over millions of years, leaving the universe dark and cold until, after several hundred million years, the first atoms began to form and gave birth to stars and black holes, events which threw out radio waves.

An earlier generation of radio telescopes is already looking for high-frequency waves, and was responsible for the discovery of pulsar and quasar stars.

But low-frequency radio waves can travel much further, which means the new network, called Lofar (low-frequency array) will see more distant events, which date from earlier in the expanding universe.

Distant galaxies

Project leader Professor Rob Fender, an astronomer at the University of Southampton, said: "Low-frequency radio waves allow us to see through the interstellar gas that obscures much of the most distant parts of the universe, so we will be able to detect the most distant galaxies."

Construction on the first Lofar telescope in Britain has just been completed in Chilbolton, Oxfordshire, and there are plans to build another four in Edinburgh, Cambridge, and at Jodrell Bank outside Manchester.

There are another 48 already built or near completion elsewhere in Europe. Each consists of a series of aerials set up in a field.