By Leo Blitz
Director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at UC, Berkeley
posted: 06:30 am ET
13 May 2004
Imagine having a telescope one hundred or even one thousand times more powerful than any previous telescope.
It might be hard to decide what to look at first, but for astronomers using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) for conventional radio astronomy, it will not be too much of a problem. This new instrument will be the fourth largest telescope in the world, as gauged by its collecting area. But its real claim to fame is speed. For surveying the radio sky (a task necessary for SETI discoveries), the ATA will be almost 1,000 times faster than the Arecibo telescope, between 20 and 2000 times faster than the Very Large Array (depending on the scientific program) and 50 times faster than the Green Bank Telescope (GBT).
Moreover, the ATA will be able to resolve sources – i.e., to see fine detail – better than either the GBT (by a factor of 10) or Arecibo (by a factor of 3), and it will have spectral capabilities that simply aren’t available at the other telescopes: it can observe multiple spectral windows simultaneously within the entire spectrum to which the telescope is sensitive, a new capability available for the first time on the ATA.
So what will the radio astronomers want to do with this fabulous new instrument? In broad terms, the flagship science will be to determine the structure of the local universe, to search for new effects of black holes, and to seek out the primordial dark matter condensations of the universe. The ATA will be uniquely capable of discovering new phenomena related to the transient radio sky, that is, sources that vary in brightness on time scales of seconds to years. Many of these originate in processes involving ultramassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, distant supernova explosions near the edge of the observable universe, and gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic events in the cosmos. The telescope will also be a general-purpose radio telescope that will provide fundamentally new measurements and insights into the density of the very early universe, the formation of stars, the magnetic fields in the interstellar medium, pulsars, and a host of other phenomena of deep interest to astronomers. Let’s look at two of the major areas of astronomical research for the ATA.
Read the Full Story at Space.com
Sir Ulli