In this image of a spinning neutron star surrounded by a cloud of energetic particles, X-rays from Chandra in gold are seen along with infrared data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope in red, green and blue.
Canada's next big thing is a project of astronomical proportions - one that could spur a new telecom knowledge economy.
Thomson Reuters data indicates the country's world share of research in space science rose to 7 per cent in 2009-2013, after hovering around 4 per cent to 5 per cent since the early 1980s. That modest spike in Canadian citations points to a rising-star status in the astrophysics field, according to some of the country's top space researchers.
"It's definitely a golden age of cosmology, and Canada is at the forefront internationally," said Gary Hinshaw, a University of British Columbia astrophysicist who came here after 20 years at NASA.
"For the size of the country, our reputation is outsized in the field. I have inquiries from post-doctoral applicants all the time from Europe and the U.S. who would like to come and work here."
Amid the cosmology research boom, Canadian astrophysicists are constructing a novel "digital radio telescope" using commercially available technology — a development that could push advances in wireless communications.
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope will occupy 100 square metres of protected Okanagan Valley land in Penticton, B.C., by the time it's completed in 2016.
Its mission?
"To make the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever," Hinshaw says.
CHIME receives funding from an $11.5-million grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which was intrigued by the telescope's scientific and economic promise.
"These research projects are forceful drivers of growth," Gilles Patry, president and CEO of the foundation, said in a release.
"They have an exciting opportunity to create real impact."
Along with UBC cosmologist Mark Halpern, Hinshaw is among the top 1 per cent of the world's most influential sources in the field of space science, as ranked by Thomson Reuters' Highly Cited Researchers listings in 2014. The UBC colleagues have co-authored eight of the 10 most-cited articles in astrophysical journals in the past five years.
Together, they're shepherding CHIME in collaboration with laboratories at McGill and the University of Toronto and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton.
As it takes billions of years for light to reach us from distant galaxies, CHIME would allow scientists to look 11 billion years into the universe's past to learn more about its origins.
"It's not exactly time travel, but it's directly looking at the universe's past," said Kris Sigurdson, a UBC theoretical physicist and CHIME co-investigator.
The group hopes to study the properties of "dark energy," one of the biggest cosmic mysteries today, and measure the expansion history of the universe to understand its origins.
"CHIME is a completely made-in-Canada thing, it's innovative, and it will be transformative," Halpern said.
Canada has, in recent years, emerged as a leading producer of superconducting electronics in telescopes that observe the sky in the millimetre band: a wavelength well suited to seeing faraway galaxies.
"Just about every telescope on planet Earth that's looking up at the microwave background is doing it with technology coming from Canada," McGill University cosmologist Matt Dobbs said.
Even so, Dobbs, a partner on CHIME, says it's unlike any telescope observing the sky today.
It has no moving parts but uses radio signals to digitally "point" the telescope at many directions simultaneously.
"It's where many astronomers want to be in the future," Dobbs said of the project, which would have a footprint larger than six NHL hockey rinks.
The radio band has long wavelengths with frequencies on par with most industrial technology such as cellphones. CHIME scientists are harnessing cheap commercial components, such as processing units originally developed for computer games, for a new specialized system.
It's a potentially faster, better, cheaper way of mapping the universe than the billion-dollar space ventures coming out of U.S. and European groups, according to Hinshaw.
"The technology and the know-how to do that is going to be very important for Canada's economy," Dobbs said. "A lot of the people we're training are going to be regular astronomers, but some of them are going to work in the telecommunications industry."
Beyond space science, Hinshaw expects big commercial ideas to develop out of new applications for current technologies. Australian astronomers, after all, invented wi-fi to detect radio waves from exploding black holes.
"Scientists are always looking out to exploit technological developments and turn them in directions that weren't envisioned before," Hinshaw said. "We like to think this has a fundamental impact on Canada's technological competitiveness in the years to come."
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