The Quest To Build a Telescope On the Moon

The dream of a lunar telescope dates back to the 1960s, as the moon offers a unique advantage with its distance from earthly electronics and minimal noise from human technology or the Earth's magnetosphere. Astrophysicist Jack Burns has been advocating for a moon-based telescope since 1984, and despite the slow progress, he remains committed to the idea. FarView, a proposed telescope, would have hundreds of thousands of antennas and could detect some of the oldest light in existence, dating back to the universe's beginning 13.8 billion years ago. The universe began as a dense, fast-expanding soup of matter and energy, and after 380,000 years, it cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form. This was followed by the Cosmic Dark Ages, a period of millions of years without stars or galaxies, which scientists know little about. Hydrogen occasionally releases light with a wavelength of twenty-one centimetres, which is now stretched due to the universe's expansion, allowing scientists to determine its age and distance. A radio telescope on the moon could create a three-dimensional picture of the early universe. A smaller version of FarView, called FARSIDE, is also being considered, with one or two hundred antennas. Despite the challenges, scientists believe that building a radio telescope on the moon could provide invaluable insights into the universe's early stages.