CU’S Burns leads lunar observation project

B OULDER» University of Colorado researchers are planning to put a satellite in orbit around the moon to observe what they call the universe’s “dark ages” — an era just 15 million to 30 million years after the Big Bang, before the first stars illuminated the cosmic dawn.

“What we’re doing is we’re really opening up a whole new window to the early universe that has never been explored before,” said Jack Burns, a CU professor of astrophysics and planetary science and also vice president emeritus for academic affairs and research at the university.

NASA recently selected the Dark Ages Polarimetry Pathfinder (DAPPER), to be led by Burns, as one of nine small satellite missions that are expected to launch as early as 2022 or 2023, according to Burns.

The DAPPER team will devote the next six months coming up with a detailed design of the proposed mission, which has as its goal the detection of faint signals from the clouds of hydrogen gas that once filled the early cosmos.

“That’s a unique time period, where there’s a lot that is happening,” Burns said Wednesday. “The cores of stars are collapsing, and that will lead to the first black holes. … There was not a lot of astrophysics; mainly, just cosmology and expanding universe.”

Burns’ team aims to launch the DAPPER small satellite, carrying about a $35 million price tag, from the Lunar Gateway, a space station planned by NASA and other international partners to orbit the moon over the next decade.

“What we are proposing is novel, in that we’re looking at the gas, the hydrogen gas, that is in the early universe, and any heating and cooling interactions, or any interactions between dark matter and the hydrogen gas which has been suggested recently form other observations. We will be able to pick it up with our radio telescope,” Burns said.

“We are probing what astronomers are calling the dark ages — dark matter, in the dark ages. I’ve started to call it dark cosmology.”

Joking that Pink Floyd “didn’t do us any favors” with its “Dark Side of the Moon,” he pointed out that the far side of the moon actually gets equal amounts of dark and light — but because it is “tidally locked,” with the same side always facing away from Earth, it is quiet.

“We want to take advantage of the far side of the moon, which always points away from the Earth,” Burns said. “It is radio quiet. We need a really quiet place to pick up these signals from the early universe. That’s why we can’t do this experiment from the ground. The radio noise is too loud.

“Plus, the frequencies we’re looking at are well below the FM band. They don’t even penetrate beyond the ionosphere of the Earth.”

Burns served on the presidential transition team for NASA, and had a direct hand in writing the directive President Donald Trump issued in December 2017 calling for returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, with an eye toward eventually going to Mars and beyond.

“I’ve been very involved in the lunar program, not only for this administration, but for the last 30 years trying to get us back to the moon,” Burns said.