PROVO, UTAH (ABC 4 News) – The Arecibo Observatory has been featured in numerous movies including James Bond and Contact. It’s the largest, most sensitive, radio telescope in the world. A team of BYU students and professors may have just made it more capable of unraveling the mysteries of the universe.
Brigham Young University researchers are hoping to offer a deeper and wider view of space to astronomers using the huge telescope in Puerto Rico. The dish collects frequencies too low to be seen by the human eye, they are processed electronically. Dr. Karl Warnick says “you have a dish antenna, and that dish focuses the signal from some point in the sky, and that energy is focused at the one spot. There’s a feed that is picked up by computers”
BYU’S phase-to-ray design puts about twenty smaller antennas near that focal point allowing scientists to look in multiple directions at once. Brian Jeffs, a professor of electrical and computer engineering says “we turn a big dish single antenna telescope into a radio camera that can look at multiple pixels on the sky and take a snapshot.”
So, instead of scanning one spot at a time, those looking into deep space can see more, faster. Dr. Warnick says “there are astronomers world wide that are competing to get time on this telescope, you know their careers depend on it, so if we can deliver a better instrument that can look at more of the sky, that benefits a lot of people across the planet.” Researchers say the technology recently installed in Puerto Rico may eventually lead to answers about how the universe began. “Radio astronomers are really on the forefront of trying to find what is out there.”
