Hydrogen is a key building block of the cosmos. Whether stripped down to its charged core, or piled into a molecule, the nature of its presence can tell you a lot about the Universe’s features on the largest of scales.
For that reason astronomers are very interested in detecting signals from this element, wherever it can be found.
Now the light signature of uncharged, atomic hydrogen has been measured further from Earth than ever before, by some margin. The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India has picked up a signal with a lookback time – the time between the light being emitted and being detected – of a huge 8.8 billion years.
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