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b) Why are astronomers using radio telescopes looking for far stars instead of a telescope?
First of all, what is a radio telescope? The first non-visual spectral region that was used extensively for astronomical observations was the radio frequency band. Telescopes observing at these wavelengths are commonly called radio telescopes. Radio telescopes may be made much larger than optical/infrared telescopes because the wavelengths of radio waves are much longer than wavelengths of optical light. A rule of thumb is that the reflecting surface must not have irregularities larger than about 1/5 the wavelength of light that is being focused. By that criterion a radio telescope is several hundred thousand times …show more content…

The 1000-foot reflector dish, also featured in the James Bond film, "Goldeneye," is the largest stationary radio telescope and most powerful radar in the world. Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor of Princeton University earned a Nobel Prize by using the dish in the 1970s to discover the first pulsar in a binary system, confirming a prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
In the early 1990s, Arecibo was used to detect the first planets outside the solar system. The dish recently received a facelift in a $27-million upgrade which makes it four times more sensitive to radio emissions from distant galaxies. The dish was used in the 1960s to chart accurately for the first time the rate at which the planet Mercury rotates. More recently it studied ice in Mercury's polar craters, the chemistry of Earth's upper atmosphere and rotating pulsars. The new upgrade will let astronomers "hear" signals from much greater distances, and further back in time, than before.

d) What is VLA? How does it work?
The VLA is an interferometer; this means that it operates by multiplying the data from each pair of telescopes together to form interference patterns. The structure of those interference patterns, and how they change with time as the earth rotates, reflect the structure of radio sources on the sky: we can take these patterns and use a mathematical technique called the Fourier transform to make

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