Explosive event

Photo Credit: John Mallon III/Antarctic Photo Library

South Pole Telescope

“Studying the Epoch of Reionization is important because it represents one of the few ways by which we can study the first stars and galaxies,” said study co-author John Carlstrom of the University of Chicago who is the principal investigator for the SPT experiment.

The epoch’s short duration suggests that reionization was more explosive than scientists had previously thought. It suggests that massive galaxies played a key role in reionization, because smaller galaxies would have formed much earlier. Rapid reionization also argues against many proposed astrophysical phenomena that would slow the process.

This is only the beginning of what astronomers expect to learn about reionization from the SPT. The current results are based on only the first third of the telescope’s full survey.

“We expect to measure the duration of reionization to within 50 million years with the current survey,” said study co-author Christian Reichardt , a Berkeley astrophysicist. “With planned upgrades to the instrument, we hope to improve this even further in the next five years.”

The finding follows a report in the journal Nature last month that the SPT discovered a massive galaxy cluster where stars are forming at the highest rate ever observed. [See previous article — Cluster of discoveries: South Pole Telescope finds fastest star-making region in the universe.]

The 280-ton telescope stands more than 60 meters tall and is the largest astronomical telescope ever built in Antarctica’s clear, dry air. It sits at an elevation of more than 2,800 meters on the polar plateau. Because of its location at the Earth’s axis, it can conduct long-term observations of a single patch of sky.

The University of Chicago leads the SPT collaboration, which includes research groups from Argonne National Laboratory , Cardiff University , Case Western Reserve University, Harvard University , Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat , Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory , McGill University , University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Davis , University of Colorado at Boulder , University of Michigan and individual scientists at several other institutions.

NSF-funded research in this article: John Carlstrom, John Ruhl, Joseph Mohr, William Holzapfel and Nils Halverson, University of Chicago, Award No. 0638937 . Partial support also is provided by the NSF-funded Physics Frontier Center of UChicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics , the Kavli Foundation , and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation .