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NSF/Steffen Richter/Harvard Univ./SPL : Telescopes in Antarctica track the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

Multi-telescope project has ambitious goals and a big price tag.

Edwin Cartlidge - 30 October 2017

US researchers have drafted plans to study the faint afterglow of the Big Bang using a new facility. They hope it will be sensitive enough to confirm whether or not the infant Universe underwent a brief period of explosive expansion known as inflation.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Stage-4 experiment (CMB-S4) would comprise three 6-metre and 14 half-metre telescopes distributed across two sites in Antarctica and Chile, according to a preliminary design due to be made public this week. Potentially up and running within a decade, the facility would be nearly 100 times as sensitive as existing ground-based CMB experiments.

It won’t be cheap, however. Construction will cost a little over US$400 million, according to the expert task force commissioned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) to produce the design. That is at least twice as much as envisioned in a less-detailed review 3 years ago, and 30 times the cost of existing experiments.

 

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