"Unlocking the Universe: Observatory to Explore Big Bang's Afterglow"

Get ready for the 'best view ever' of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with the Simons Observatory, set to begin observations in the Atacama Desert of Chile. This new observatory, funded by the Simons Foundation, will offer a tenfold increase in sensitivity compared to the Planck space probe, allowing researchers to study the CMB's temperature variations and polarization in unprecedented detail.

The Simons Observatory is an array of four telescopes, including the 6-meter Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) and three 0.4-meter Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs). The LAT will map 40% of the sky, while the SATs will focus on a smaller patch to study large-scale swirls in the polarization field of the CMB. These swirls, known as B-mode patterns, could provide the first incontrovertible evidence for cosmic inflation and the elusive gravitational waves from the Big Bang.

The observatory's primary goal is to find signs of inflation, but it will also contribute to other areas of research. The LAT data will help create 3D maps of galaxy clusters, determine the mass of neutrinos, and track asteroids and active black holes. The Simons Observatory will have two runs, each lasting about four years, with a planned $53-million upgrade in between.

The Simons Observatory is an essential step towards the even more ambitious CMB-S4 project, planned for the mid-2030s, which aims to improve sensitivity to the inflationary signal by another factor of six. The Simons Observatory's hardware could potentially be reused as part of the CMB-S4 collaboration.

The quest for direct detection of gravitational waves from the Big Bang has been ongoing since the BICEP2 experiment's bold claim in 2014, which was later retracted due to dust interference. The Simons Observatory offers a new opportunity to detect these primordial signals, taking us back to 13.8 billion years ago, with energy densities 15 orders of magnitude larger than anything we can create in the lab.

The Simons Observatory is set to revolutionize our understanding of the early universe, gravitational waves, and cosmic inflation. With its high-resolution map of the CMB, researchers will be able to visualize the Universe at an early age and study how its primordial radiation was affected during its 13.8 billion-year journey to Earth.

Source: <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00333-z>