Fig Credit: (one of my favorite comics - XKCD)
Today i'm reading the intro part of the book that talks about different types of telescopes. I might have read it before but i guess i should be familiar with them. When I talk with my fellow astronomer friends, I want to know which telescope they are referring to ... where it is, what it is for etc.
Today I only aim to read about radio telescopes because they came first in the book. Radio wavelengths are some of the few wavelengths that we can observe on earth from lambda ~ 5 mm to ~30 m.
Important features that people try to detect in the radio wavelengths include
- the 21-cm emission line which is a sign of neutral hydrogen
- 1.2 mm feature for high redshift galaxy ... maybe they r looking at X-band dropouts? (where X is some photometry bands)
Important telescopes include:
- VLA in New Mexico
- Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico which is the largest single dish radio non-steerable telescope
- James Clerk Maxwell telescope on Mauna Kea
- VLBI, very large baseline inferometry (VLBI) which consists of multiple telescopes on several continents so they can have different baselines
And i know there should a few more radio arrays coming online all around the world doing exciting early universe cosmology (e.g. for the epoch of reionization). They are going to have massive data sets according to people I met at Penn. State. Hopefully they will also figure out what to do with the massive data and get good science out of them :)
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