University of Pennsylvania Astrophysics Seminar

Current cosmological measurements have left us with deep questions about our Universe: What caused the expansion of the Universe at the earliest times? How did structure form? What is Dark Energy and does it evolve with time? New experiments like CHIME are poised to address these questions through 3-dimensional maps of structure using the 21cm emission line from neutral hydrogen contained in abundance in galaxies. In this talk, I will describe recent results from the CHIME experiment that show a significant detection of neutral hydrogen in distant galaxies and lyman-alpha absorption. I will discuss improvements we will need to make in future analyses, and how measurements of the instrument beams for telescopes using the 21cm emission of neutral hydrogen might be performed with drones.