Remember the days of blurry indecipherable images from radio telescopes? Here's what we now have from MeerKAT, a radio telescope in South Africa showing the center of the Milky Way: Other pics and description at: http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/meerkat-radio-image-milky-ways-center-10514.html Here's an image of the Milky Way taken by the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope: These modern radio telescopes look like a field of mechanical spiders only a couple feet tall: In the works is the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope one kilometer on a side. That will give literally thousands of times better images that those above.
Another MeerKAT image of the center of the Milky Way. The bright dot in the lower center is Sagittarius A*, the massive black hole at the center of our universe. The main object in the upper area is a "super bubble" with long streamers of radio filaments.
Brilliant photos. Between all the planned and new ground based astronomy systems and some of the next generation deep space interferometers that have been proposed or talked about lately we'll be able to observe any nearby life bearing planets generations before there's even the remotest chance of sending probes to them. Let alone crewed missions.
Amen. The idea that we can do this stuff from Earth's surface is huge, I think. And, what we and other countries are preparing for astronomy from space is incredibly exciting.
Absolutely! Radio telescopes are emerging as superstars! There is a radio telescope being designed in Europe where the telescope will be like the ones depicted above, but spread across several countries. The whole challenge with radio is that the wavelengths are long. With visual telescopes, light has incredibly short wavelengths, so even our eyes have enough room for them. When a radio telescope gets stretched across a thousand miles, or whatever, even the kilometer wide radio waves can be captured enough to come up with fabulous pics. Before, when radio telescopes depended on single dishes, they just could not come even close to picking up the long wavelengths arriving from distant objects - so the results always looked like blobs, even though they carried some information for scientists. I really can't wait!
Funny thing about radio telescopes, they use their own little itsy bitsy teenie tiny unit of energy [flux] density - the Jansky 1 Jansky is equal to one hundredth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth watts per square meter per hertz. That is the base magnitude of the energy [density] levels involved.
Wow!! I had no idea. However, there is going to be a huge cost in storing and processing the data. They say that when completed the Square Kilometer Array telescope will generate 5 zettabytes per year when completed. 1 zettabyte was the total internet traffic of the entire world in 2016. They talk about hundreds of hours of supercomputer time for the data collected by one existing radio telescope today - the Murchison(sp) in Australia. And, there are other such telescopes in operation or in construction. So overall, these telescopes are going to be stupendous energy hogs. As a result, astronomers used to getting access to and examining all visual light telescopes in their offices like they do today, it might take an act of congress to look at these results - unless you already own a few supercomputers!
