6.4 Radio Telescopes

Detection of Radio Energy from Space

It is important to understand that radio waves cannot be “heard”: they are not the sound waves you hear coming out of the radio receiver in your home or car. Like light, radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, but unlike light, we cannot detect them with our senses—we must rely on electronic equipment to pick them up. In commercial radio broadcasting, we encode sound information (music or a newscaster’s voice) into radio waves. These must be decoded at the other end and then turned back into sound by speakers or headphones.

The radio waves we receive from space do not, of course, have music or other program information encoded in them. If cosmic radio signals were translated into sound, they would sound like the static you hear when scanning between stations. Nevertheless, there is information in the radio waves we receive—information that can tell us about the chemistry and physical conditions of the sources of the waves.

Just as vibrating charged particles can produce electromagnetic waves (see the Radiation and Spectra chapter), electromagnetic waves can make charged particles move back and forth. Radio waves can produce a current in conductors of electricity such as metals. An antenna is such a conductor: it intercepts radio waves, which create a feeble current in it. The current is then amplified in a radio receiver until it is strong enough to measure or record. Like your television or radio, receivers can be tuned to select a single frequency (channel). In astronomy, however, it is more common to use sophisticated data-processing techniques that allow thousands of separate frequency bands to be detected simultaneously. Thus, the astronomical radio receiver operates much like a spectrometer on a visible-light or infrared telescope, providing information about how much radiation we receive at each wavelength or frequency. After computer processing, the radio signals are recorded on magnetic disks for further analysis.

Radio waves are reflected by conducting surfaces, just as light is reflected from a shiny metallic surface, and according to the same laws of optics. A radio-reflecting telescope consists of a concave metal reflector (called a dish), analogous to a telescope mirror. The radio waves collected by the dish are reflected to a focus, where they can then be directed to a receiver and analyzed. Because humans are such visual creatures, radio astronomers often construct a pictorial representation of the radio sources they observe. Figure 6.18 shows such a radio image of a distant galaxy, where radio telescopes reveal vast jets and complicated regions of radio emissions that are completely invisible in photographs taken with light.

Radio astronomy is a young field compared with visible-light astronomy, but it has experienced tremendous growth in recent decades. The world’s largest radio reflectors that can be pointed to any direction in the sky have apertures of 100 meters. One of these has been built at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia (Figure 6.19). Table 6.2 lists some of the major radio telescopes of the world.

As we discussed earlier, a telescope’s ability to show us fine detail (its resolution) depends upon its aperture, but it also depends upon the wavelength of the radiation that the telescope is gathering. The longer the waves, the harder it is to resolve fine detail in the images or maps we make. Because radio waves have such long wavelengths, they present tremendous challenges for astronomers who need good resolution. In fact, even the largest radio dishes on Earth, operating alone, cannot make out as much detail as the typical small visible-light telescope used in a college astronomy lab. To overcome this difficulty, radio astronomers have learned to sharpen their images by linking two or more radio telescopes together electronically. Two or more telescopes linked together in this way are called an interferometer.

“Interferometer” may seem like a strange term because the telescopes in an interferometer work cooperatively; they don’t “interfere” with each other. Interference, however, is a technical term for the way that multiple waves interact with each other when they arrive in our instruments, and this interaction allows us to coax more detail out of our observations. The resolution of an interferometer depends upon the separation of the telescopes, not upon their individual apertures. Two telescopes separated by 1 kilometer provide the same resolution as would a single dish 1 kilometer across (although they are not, of course, able to collect as much radiation as a radio-wave bucket that is 1 kilometer across).

To get even better resolution, astronomers combine a large number of radio dishes into an interferometer array. In effect, such an array works like a large number of two-dish interferometers, all observing the same part of the sky together. Computer processing of the results permits the reconstruction of a high-resolution radio image. The most extensive such instrument in the United States is the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) near Socorro, New Mexico. It consists of 27 movable radio telescopes (on railroad tracks), each having an aperture of 25 meters, spread over a total span of about 36 kilometers. By electronically combining the signals from all of its individual telescopes, this array permits the radio astronomer to make pictures of the sky at radio wavelengths comparable to those obtained with a visible-light telescope, with a resolution of about 1 arcsecond.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile (Figure 6.20), at an altitude of 16,400 feet, consists of 12 7-meter and 54 12-meter telescopes, and can achieve baselines up to 16 kilometers. Since it became operational in 2013, it has made observations at resolutions down to 6 milliarcseconds (0.006 arcseconds), a remarkable achievement for radio astronomy.

Initially, the size of interferometer arrays was limited by the requirement that all of the dishes be physically wired together. The maximum dimensions of the array were thus only a few tens of kilometers. However, larger interferometer separations can be achieved if the telescopes do not require a physical connection. Astronomers, with the use of current technology and computing power, have learned to time the arrival of electromagnetic waves coming from space very precisely at each telescope and combine the data later. If the telescopes are as far apart as California and Australia, or as West Virginia and Crimea in Ukraine, the resulting resolution far surpasses that of visible-light telescopes.

The United States operates the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), made up of 10 individual telescopes stretching from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii (Figure 6.21). The VLBA, completed in 1993, can form astronomical images with a resolution of 0.0001 arcseconds, permitting features as small as 10 astronomical units (AU) to be distinguished at the center of our Galaxy.

Recent advances in technology have also made it possible to do interferometry at visible-light and infrared wavelengths. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, three observatories with multiple telescopes each began using their dishes as interferometers, combining their light to obtain a much greater resolution. In addition, a dedicated interferometric array was built on Mt. Wilson in California. Just as in radio arrays, these observations allow astronomers to make out more detail than a single telescope could provide.

Radar Astronomy

Radar is the technique of transmitting radio waves to an object in our solar system and then detecting the radio radiation that the object reflects back. The time required for the round trip can be measured electronically with great precision. Because we know the speed at which radio waves travel (the speed of light), we can determine the distance to the object or a particular feature on its surface (such as a mountain).

Radar observations have been used to determine the distances to planets and how fast things are moving in the solar system (using the Doppler effect, discussed in the Radiation and Spectra chapter). Radar waves have played important roles in navigating spacecraft throughout the solar system. In addition, as will be discussed in later chapters, radar observations have determined the rotation periods of Venus and Mercury, probed tiny Earth-approaching asteroids, and allowed us to investigate the mountains and valleys on the surfaces of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the large moons of Jupiter.

Any radio dish can be used as a radar telescope if it is equipped with a powerful transmitter as well as a receiver. For many years, the most spectacular facility in the world for radar astronomy was the 1000-foot (305-meter) telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico (Figure 6.22). The Arecibo telescope was too large to be pointed directly at different parts of the sky. Instead, it was constructed in a huge natural “bowl” (more than a mere dish) formed by several hills, and it was lined with reflecting metal panels. A limited ability to track astronomical sources was achieved by moving the receiver system, which was suspended on cables 100 meters above the surface of the bowl. Unfortunately, the telescope was seriously damaged in the powerful storms of 2020 and had to be decommissioned. An even larger (500-meter) radar telescope has recently gone into operation in China and is called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST).