Facilities for US radioastronomy

NOV 01, 1982

At the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of their science, radioastronomers are looking forward to a very‐long‐baseline interferometric array, a millimeter‐wave telescope and a submillimeter‐wave antenna.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2914846

Patrick Thaddeus

This year radioastronomers are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the birth of their science: the discovery by Karl Jansky, a physicist at Bell Labs studying interference on the trans‐Atlantic radiotelephone service, of a source of radio noise fixed on the celestial sphere toward the galactic center. A modern receiver operating at the same wavelength of 14 meters can detect this continuum emission—the synchrotron radiation from cosmicray electrons in the interstellar magnetic field—along the entire galactic plane and, indeed from all directions, albeit with weaker intensities. Large aperture synthesis interferometers such as the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico (figure 1) are now routinely mapping in distant galaxies (figure 2) radiation of a similar character.

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More about the Authors

Patrick Thaddeus. Goddard Institute of Space Studies, New York.