From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 11:54:43 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: cunews_at_cornell.edu<mailto:cunews_at_cornell.edu>
To: CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu<mailto:CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu> ; CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu<mailto:CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 1:33 PM
Subject: Cornell News: New eye for Arecibo telescope
Arecibo Observatory gets 7-pixel eye on the sky that will make
world's most sensitive dish radio telescope incredibly more sensitive
FOR RELEASE: April 21, 2004
Contact: David Brand
Office: 607-255-3651
E-mail: deb27_at_cornell.edu<mailto:deb27_at_cornell.edu>
ARECIBO, P.R.. -- The Arecibo Observatory telescope, the largest and
most sensitive single dish radio telescope in the world, is about to
get a good deal more sensitive.
Today (Wednesday, April 21) the telescope got a new "eye on the sky"
that will turn the huge dish, operated by Cornell University for the
National Science Foundation, into the equivalent of a seven-pixel
radio camera.
The complex new addition to the Arecibo telescope was hauled 150
meters (492 feet) above the telescope's 1,000-foot-diameter (305
meters) reflector dish starting in the early morning hours. The
device, the size of a washing machine, took 30 minutes to reach a
platform inside the suspended Gregorian dome, where ultimately it
will be cooled and then connected to a fiber optic transmission
system leading to ultra-high speed digital signal processors. The new
instrument is called ALFA (for Arecibo L-Band Feed Array) and is
essentially a camera for making radio pictures of the sky. ALFA will
conduct large-scale sky surveys with unprecedented sensitivity,
enabling astronomers to collect data about seven times faster than at
present, giving the telescope an even broader appeal to astronomers.
The ALFA receiver was built by the Australian research group,
Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation, under
contract to the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) at
Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y. Development of ALFA was overseen by the
observatory's technical staff. The rest of the ALFA system, including
ultra-fast data processing machines, are under development at NAIC.
Radio telescopes traditionally have been limited to seeing just one
spot -- a single pixel -- on the sky at once. Pictures of the sky
have been built up by painstakingly imaging one spot after another.
But ALFA lets the telescope see seven spots -- seven pixels -- on the
sky at once, slashing the time needed to make all-sky surveys. Steve
Torchinsky, ALFA project manager at Arecibo Observatory, says the new
device will make it possible to find many new fast-spinning, highly
dense stars called pulsars and will improve the chances of picking up
very rare kinds of systems -- for instance, a pulsar orbiting a black
hole.
It also will map the neutral hydrogen gas in our galaxy, the Milky
Way, as well as in other galaxies. Hydrogen is the most abundant
element in the universe. "A whole range of science is planned for
ALFA, " says Torchinsky. "Arecibo's large collecting area is
particularly well-suited to pulsar studies."
NAIC commissioned CSIRO to build ALFA following the success of a
ground-breaking "multibeam" instrument it had designed and built for
the Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia. That instrument
increased the Parkes telescope's view 13-fold, making it practical
for the first time to search the whole sky for faint and hidden
galaxies.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide
additional information on this news release. Some might not be part
of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over
their content or availability.
o Arecibo Observatory: <http://www.naic.edu o ALFA: <http://alfa.naic.edu/ o CSIRO: <http://www.atnf.csiro.au/ -30-
The web version of this release may be found at
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: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 12:10:04 PDT
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/April04/Arecibo.Eye.deb.html
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