High in the mountains of Northern Chile sits the Simons Observatory, a facility that is home to the world’s most advanced instrument for studying the cosmic microwave background. The images captured by its telescopes will offer clues into the origins, evolution, and composition of the universe. This July, the University of St. Michael’s became a gathering place for astronomers and astrophysicists with ties to the Simons Observatory to piece together the story of the early universe.
From July 20 to 24, the University of St. Michael’s College welcomed researchers from the Simons Observatory’s collaborating institutions around the world for a week of face-to-face meetings, marking the first time this annual gathering has been held in Canada. Teams of students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty came together on campus to share updates, present findings, and plan the next phases of their work.
The Simons Observatory is an experimental cosmology project dedicated to deepening our understanding of the early universe, while advancing precision telescope technology. Located at high altitude in Chile’s Atacama Desert, its millimetre-wavelength telescopes capture images used to study the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the universe, helping researchers investigate the physics of the Big Bang, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the properties of neutrinos, and how structure forms across the cosmos.
The University of Toronto is a key institutional partner in this global collaboration and the meeting received funding and support from the Dunlap Institute at U of T, the University of St. Michael’s College, U of T’s Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA).
‘The Bible and the Big Bang’ at St. Mike’s
One of the key organizers was St. Michael’s Professor Adam Hincks, S.J., the inaugural holder of the Sutton Family Chair in Science, Christianity and Cultures and cross-appointed between The David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and St. Michael’s College.
While his work on the Simons Observatory and in the Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics is scientific, Professor Hincks is also a Jesuit priest, and he brings both callings together in his course “The Bible and the Big Bang,” cross-listed between Astronomy & Astrophysics and St. Michael’s Christianity & Culture programme.
The course offers students a deep dive into early-universe cosmology, and the subject matter relates directly to his research and the science being done by the Simons Observatory, such as understanding how the universe behaved in the first sliver of the first second after the Big Bang.
‘Get a sense of the big-picture progress’ between many collaborators
The gathering drew about 180 in-person attendees, with roughly another 70 joining remotely, representing 65 institutions across 16 countries.
Among those in attendance was Erika Hornecker, a PhD candidate at U of T, who has spent three years as a junior member of the Simons Observatory collaboration, contributing to the project’s data cleaning pipeline and to work identifying astrophysical transient events in the data.
“I love hearing about all the great work our colleagues have been doing, and these meetings are always a great opportunity to take a step back and get a sense of the big-picture progress happening across the collaboration,” she said.
Simran Nerval, also a PhD candidate at U of T, has spent the past four years preparing to use Simons Observatory data to study cosmic inflation, the period of exponential expansion the universe underwent in a fraction of a second following the Big Bang. She also served on the local organizing committee for the meeting, helping to plan a networking evening for junior members of the project, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
“It has been amazing to see how far everyone has gotten in such a short amount of time with the data that has been collected since the Simons Observatory was built. It has been great to see how much of this work has been led by junior members,” she said.