How The Universe Stacks Up
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A major field of study in astronomy seeks to understand how galaxies form and evolve. One advantage that we possess is that as we study the light from the most distant galaxies, we...
Latest Radio telescopes Stories
South Africa's "Square Kilometre Array" Project to Revolutionize Man's Look at the Heavens WASHINGTON, June 17, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- When it's completed in the early 2020s, the Square Kilometre Array - or SKA - will be by far the largest radio telescope ever built, requiring massive amounts of IT infrastructure and supercomputing capacity to be assembled in Africa. South Africa was selected over Australia to host the bulk of the project, which will take scientists...
Arecibo Observatory catches the most detailed radar images ever of asteroid 1998 QE2 and its newly-discovered moon as they safely pass our planet. Arecibo, Puerto Rico (PRWEB) June 14, 2013 Arecibo Observatory continues to take radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon as the space rock sails safely passed earth this week. The images show a dark cratered asteroid 3 kilometers across (1.9 miles) with a companion moon 750 meters (2,500 feet) in size. The asteroid and its moon passed 6...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Approximately 80 percent of all unidentifiable millimeter wave signals emitted in the universe actually originate from galaxies, according to new research published in Saturday’s edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Based on observations collected using Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) telescopes, professor Kouji Ohta and postdoctoral researcher Bunyo Hatsukade of Kyoto University in Japan and their...
SKA Scientific studies done with the "PAPER" array, one of the world-class scientific instruments in South Africa's Karoo Radio Astronomy Reserve, is producing ground-breaking science and spectacular cosmic images, resulting in several important articles in top astronomy journals. The primary goal of PAPER (Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization) is to detect emission from the neutral gas that pervaded the universe before the first galaxies and black holes were formed. This...
Watch the video “Intergalactic Clouds Lurk Between Nearby Galaxies" John P. Millis, PhD for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As we gaze into space beyond the confines of our own Milky Way, we see a Universe filled with galaxies. But what scientists have come to realize is that the emptiness that spans between these giant pools of stars is not empty at all, but rather is filled with massive amounts of gas. In fact, these gas reservoirs can sometimes outweigh the galaxies...
Square Kilometre Array Less than a year after the decision to site the revolutionary Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in both Southern Africa and Australia, the SKA Organisation has opened its new international headquarters. In front of an invited audience of local and global dignitaries, scientists and engineers, the UK Minister for Universities and Science the Rt. Hon. David Willetts MP recently opened the building which will be home to the team managing the construction, design and...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers say they have discovered a star factory in a galaxy so distant that they see it when the Universe was only six percent of its current age of about 13.7 billion years old. The team wrote in the journal Nature that HFLS3 sits at about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth. They said the distant galaxy is producing about 3,000 Suns per year, which is more than 2,000 times that of our own Milky Way galaxy. "This is the most...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers report in The Astrophysical Journal that they have determined the positions of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. The group used the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope during their observations. This telescope can capture just as many observations of this group of galaxies in just a few hours as similar telescopes can in more than a decade. [ Video:...
ASTRON This week, a team of Dutch astronomers and engineers led by astronomer Joeri van Leeuwen (ASTRON) was awarded a grant to turn the new ‘Apertif' receivers on the Westerbork telescope into high-speed cameras. The receivers will expand the Westerbork field of view by over a factor 30 but the system is restricted to making images at the rate of one every second. The new upgrade increases this to 10,000 frames per second, allowing astronomers to survey the sky with greater sensitivity...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of researchers announced it has found some of the Universe’s earliest starburst galaxies, essentially young energetic clusters of cosmic gas and dust that form stars at an alarming rate. The discoveries, which were detailed in reports published in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal, were made using the newly inaugurated Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope. In its first billions...
Latest Radio telescopes Reference Libraries
Very Large Array -- The Very Large Array, one of the world's premier astronomical radio observatories, consists of 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. Each antenna is 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter. The data from the antennas is combined electronically to give the resolution of an antenna 36km (22 miles) across, with the sensitivity of a dish 130 meters (422 feet) in diameter. The VLA is an...
Radio Telescope -- In contrast to an ordinary telescope, which produces visible light images, a radio telescope "sees" radio waves emitted by radio sources located anywhere in the Universe, typically by means of a large parabolic ("dish") antenna, or arrays of them. The best-known (and largest) radio telescope is in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. A well-known radio telescope being an array of antennae is the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico. The largest (100-meter diameter) and most...
Radio Astronomy -- Radio astronomy is the study of celestial phenomena through measurement of the characteristics of radio waves emitted by physical processes occurring in space. Radio waves are much longer than light waves. In order to receive good signals, radio astronomy requires large antennas. Radio astronomy is a relatively new field of astronomical research. The earliest investigations into extraterrestrial sources of radio waves were by Karl Guthe Jansky, an engineer with Bell...
National Radio Astronomy Observatory -- The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a research facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation. They provide state-of-the-art radio telescope facilities for use by the scientific community. They conceive, design, build, operate and maintain radio telescopes used by scientists from around the world. Scientists use their facilities to study virtually all types of astronomical objects known, from planets and comets in our own Solar...
Jodrell Bank Observatory -- The Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Macclesfield, Cheshire in the north west of England is a part of the University of Manchester. It has played an important part in the research into quasars and pulsars, as well as the first detection of a gravitational lens in 1979, confirming one of Einstein's theories. It was established in 1945 by Dr. Bernard Lovell, who wanted to investigate cosmic rays after his work on radar in World War II. The first radio...
