Concerto flies to Chile

Concerto, a state-of-the-art spectrometer designed by a consortium of French laboratories, including the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, led by the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, is on its way to the Atacama Desert in Chile.

It will be installed, from April 6th, at an altitude of more than 5000 meters on the Apex telescope. Unique in its kind, Concerto should allow scientists to better understand one of the crucial periods of the formation of the Universe: the period known as reionization. To do this, it will map the sky as it was between 600 and 1.2 million years after the Big Bang, i.e. during and after the reionization period. We know that the intergalactic gas is no longer neutral for billions of years, which means that it has been partially ionized by ultraviolet radiation. But what are the objects responsible for this reionization?

Concerto addresses this question by measuring the 3D fluctuations (spatial and temporal) that are emitted globally by the cold gas in the galaxies along the dark matter filaments. This totally innovative and experimental observing strategy, called Intensity mapping, is equivalent to measuring the signal from a large number of unresolved sources. This means that scientists will not observe individual galaxies but measure their cumulative emission on each line of sight and at a given age of the Universe.

Concerto will also be able to make significant contributions in a number of areas, including the study of galaxy clusters and distant galaxies, the observation of local and intermediate redshift galaxies, and the study of galactic star-forming clouds.

This project was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), A*MIDEX, and received early support from the National Program Cosmology and Galaxies of INSU.

Read more

►https://mission.lam.fr/concerto/

Local scientific contact

Nicolas Ponthieu IPAG / OSUG