Canadian team wins prestigious award for work unravelling some of the mysteries of our universe

At first glance, it looks like anything but a telescope. Maybe a half-pipe for incredibly ambitious skateboarders, but a telescope? Definitely not.

This unique eye into the cosmos — which had its first light on Sept. 7, 2017 —  is called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), and is located near Penticton, B.C. It has already shed light on some of the most mysterious objects in the universe, called fast radio bursts, to name but one accomplishment.

Now, the CHIME team of roughly 100 has been awarded the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada's (NSERC) Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering, which includes a $250,000 grant.

The awards are handed out in several categories each year, with the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering being the top award that can be worth $1 million. This year's award went to Lenore Fahrig at Carleton University for her work on wildlife conservation.

WATCH | CHIME telescope unveiled in B.C. 

In part, the citation for the CHIME scientists reads: "The CHIME team has … created a progressive training environment for students, postdoctoral fellows and research associates. The team proudly includes members of underrepresented groups in physics. Their award-winning collaboration has already produced profound new knowledge about some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, with major advances still anticipated. It is truly one of the biggest success stories in Canadian astrophysics."

The announcement was made Tuesday morning.

"We're clearly very happy with this," said Mark Halpern, an astronomer and professor at the University of British Columbia who is also a CHIME team member. "We think of this really clearly as a team award to the CHIME team. And it's a big bunch of people who've been there: super talented students and post docs, and so on."

Some of the special qualities about the telescope is that it has no moving parts, and that it is able to scan the entire sky night after night. 

This ability to have such a wide-field view means the telescope can do a lot more and a lot faster.

Mandana Amiri, CHIME's project manager, said she's happy about the announcement, as it has come with a lot of work.

"Our team really deserved this, especially on the cosmology side," she said. "Because we need more data to be able to analyze and get the science we want. It's been a long wait for some of the students and strange times, of course. So I thought this was well timed, and called for."

In 1929, famed astronomer Edwin Hubble — for whom the space telescope is named — discovered that the universe is expanding. Since then, we've come to realize that it's expanding faster than we thought.

The reason for that is believed to be linked to dark energy, an invisible force that makes up roughly 68 per cent of the observable universe.