IN BRIEF
No signal from ‘cosmic dawn’
our years after one experiment found tentative signs of the universe’s first stars, another search has found nothing. Both experiments were looking for a low-frequency radio signal created as the intense radiation of the first stars ionised their surroundings. To see this signal, astronomers must first filter out the overwhelming background, another team announced that a floating radio antenna named SARAS 3 found no signal at that frequency. The team, led by Saurabh Singh (Raman Research Institute, India), suggests that the EDGES ‘signal’ came from unevenly distributed ground beneath the detector. Nevertheless, a future detection remains possible, the team writes, either by beating down background noise on Earth or by positioning a detector on the farside of the Moon.
