Radio Astronomy: Space Waves
Radio astronomy, an important branch of astronomy, study of celestial bodies through their emissions in the domain of radio waves.
In the late 1920′s, a young American engineer. Karl Jansky was working in Holmdel (New Jersey) in investigating the causes of radio interference from atmospheric sources involved with the long-distance transmission. Jansky built an antenna structure formed by a cage-metallica and suspended on the wheels of an old Ford, so that a motor turn the antenna in different directions. Then began a long and patient work of data collection, which consisted in recording the different types of radio noise captured at different wavelengths, but especially in the short waves and from various directions in the sky.
The results of this study indicated the existence of three types of interference: short download time from local time for downloads like distant, persistent wheezing from a mysterious source of regular movement across the sky.
After months of intense research Jansky came in the spring of 1932 concluded that the source of the noise was located in the constellation Sagittarius: in the direction of the nucleus of our Galaxy.
The news caused great excitement among the public and made many conjectures about the origin of those signals, however Jansky himself, who was an astronomer, realized that there was nothing mysterious about them realized that many celestial bodies, as well to radiate energy in the form of visible light, so do the form of radio waves.
Birth of a new tool for astronomical research. offering the possibility of studying celestial bodies are not only through the telescope, but also through the radio antennas: those that were later called radio telescopes.
Perhaps the times were not mature enough for the new science could develop, but the fact is that the request for Jansky to build a new antenna with a paraboloid to deepen the studies was not addressed.
The young research engineer at Bell Telephone were taken by another American, Grote Reber, which can be defined as the first radio astronomer in the world and authentic.
However, only after the Second World War, thanks to developments in the technologies of radar, radio astronomy could definitely taking off astronomers to discover a new universe.
The physical mechanisms that underlie the radio emissions from celestial objects are different from those who shine the same objects in visible light. While almost all electromagnetic waves within the visible spectrum has a thermal origin (ie are the result of the high temperature that is the subject of celestial objects such as stars), electromagnetic waves within the radio spectrum are due especially the movement of charged elementary particles of energy, one of the typical mechanisms of the emission of celestial radio waves, for example, so-called synchrotron radiation: the spiral movement of the beams of electrons moving to speed of light through stellar or galactic magnetic fields.
Not all the celestial bodies that are powerful stations are also visible wavelengths of electromagnetic waves. For example, the Sun and stars, we easily see at a glance, are very weak sources of electromagnetic radiation. If our eyes were sensitive to radio waves instead of visible light, the sky would change in appearance. The Sun would become a weak source, the moon and the planets would be almost invisible, almost all the stars disappear from the scene and the sky would be dominated by an intense band, the Milky Way (corresponding to the equatorial plane of our Galaxy). This flow component particles of cosmic rays produce synchrotron radiation.
In addition to this strip that would occupy the whole boundless sky, we would also isolated sources within our galaxy for supernova, pulsar, Nebulae. We could even make out distant objects that are beyond our Galaxy, external galaxies such as Andromeda type, and the quasar is the mysterious cores of galaxies that appear to be in the confines of the universe.
Radio astronomy has greatly increased knowledge of the universe at all levels. At the global level, for example, certain mechanisms of interaction between local magnetic fields have been known particles through radio observations, as in the case of Jupiter, which emits synchrotron radiation precisely because of the strong magnetic field around it.
Del Sol is able to study phenomena like sunspots and flares, which are sites of radio. Even the annual meteor showers have become an object of research in radio astronomy, thanks to the traces of the particles burn up in the atmosphere ionize the atoms therefore can be captured in radio techniques, even in broad daylight.
On a wider scale has been discovered that our galaxy is not only composed of a set of stars, but also there, including large amounts of cold hydrogen and invisible to the observation with optical instruments. The distribution of this gas, and the fact that he gives our galaxy disk configuration feature are a result of the investigation of the CIC by means of radio waves. The cold hydrogen is visible in the domain of radio waves, because it has a characteristic emission at length on da of 21 cm. That investment is due to spontaneous rotation of their electrons as a result of energy absorption.
One of the achievements of radio astronomy is the identification of numerous species of interstellar molecules. On a scale extragalactic radio astronomy has made important confirmation of the cosmological theory of the expanding universe after an initial Big Bang, through the discovery of distant radio sources that show a strong red shift, thanks to the discovery of background radiation.
Radio sources are also listed with criteria similar to those of star catalogs. It was originally used to indicate the sources that were within the same constellation with an alphabet letter from A, in the order of magnitude. For example, the most powerful radio source in the constellation Taurus, the famous Crab Nebula, was named Taurus A. However, the number of radio has increased so much in recent years, this simple cataloging has proved insufficient.
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Tags: astronomer, branch of astronomy, galaxy, Radio Astronomy, Space Waves, the radio antennas