CHIME looks like a collection of four 100-meter-long skateboarding halfpipes, but they weren't made for anybody to skate on. They were built over the past seven years to hear very weak signals from the universe and to gather one terabyte of information per second all day, every day. That means it's constantly creating and updating a massive 3D map of space.

When the 50 Canadian scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) started conceptualizing the project, no system could handle that amount of information. Thanks to advances in video game hardware, the system now exists. Since 1 TB per second is pretty insane, CHIME compresses the info it gathers by a factor of 100,000 first before saving files on disks.

Now that it's up and working, CHIME is ready to work towards achieving its primary goal: measuring the acceleration of the universe's expansion. An accurate measurement of the expansion will help scientists figure out what causes it, whether it's the mysterious form of energy that's believed to be permeating space called "dark energy" or something else. By extension, the telescope's data could one day confirm if dark energy truly exists.

University of British Columbia's Dr. Mark Halpern explains: