Latest Radio telescopes Stories
A new image of the center of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the new telescope, which is still under construction, allows astronomers to see with unprecedented quality through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center. Centaurus A is a massive elliptical radio galaxy (a galaxy that emits strong radio waves) and is the most prominent, as well as the nearest, radio galaxy in the sky. Its very...
Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com Australia and South Africa will host a giant radio telescope made up of thousands of separate dishes, which will help scientists gain a better understanding of our universe. South Africa and Australia both battled for bidding for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project, but South Africa came away with a victory by capturing two parts of the three-part project. "We may feel slightly disappointed that we didn't get the whole thing. But I think...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] A new image of the region surrounding the reflection nebula Messier 78, just to the north of Orion’s Belt, shows clouds of cosmic dust threaded through the nebula like a string of pearls. The observations, made with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope[1], use the heat glow of interstellar dust grains to show astronomers where new stars are being formed. Dust may sound boring and uninteresting — the surface grime that hides the beauty of an...
MENLO PARK, Calif., April 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SRI International is the new manager of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) facility in Northern California, home of the Allen Telescope Array. SRI will assume site management responsibilities from the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. "The Hat Creek Radio Observatory has a rich history of important scientific research about space and complex molecules," said Scott Seaton, vice president of...
[ Watch the Video ] Astronomers have made a breakthrough discovery in understanding a nearby planetary system, giving clues about how these systems form and evolve. Scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to find that planets orbiting the star Fomalhaut must be smaller than originally thought. The high-resolution images show that both the inner and outer edges of the thin, dusty disk have very sharp edges. This, as well as computer simulations, have...
IBM on Sunday, April 1 announced that it has won a $42 million contract to work with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) to research a new line of super-fast computers that will be needed for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) to perform the most exhaustive search of the origins of the universe seen to date. IBM scientists will be part of an initial five-year collaboration called DOME, named for the protective cover on telescopes and for the famous Swiss mountain, which...
DRENTHE, Netherlands and ZURICH, April 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an initial 32.9 million EURO, five-year collaboration to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems targeted for the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is an international project to build the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Scientists estimate that the processing...
A team of astronomers at Jodrell Bank Observatory have begun the deepest ever high-resolution radio imaging of the region around the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), the images originally captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the mid 1990s. The HDF led to the discovery of numerous galaxies billions of light years distant and provided direct visual evidence of the evolution of the Universe. First results from the new imaging, which uses observations from the UK's newly upgraded e-MERLIN...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Star formation in “dark markings of the sky” A new image from the APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) telescope in Chile shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. In it, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars. It is one of the regions of star formation closest to us. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at wavelengths of around one millimeter,...
[ Watch the Video ] Using observations from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has identified the moment when a black hole in our galaxy launched super-fast knots of gas into space. Racing outward at about one-quarter the speed of light, these "bullets" of ionized gas are thought to arise from a region located just outside the black hole's...
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...
