Radio Telescope Facts

Radio telescopes are telescopes that pick up radio waves instead of light waves.
Radio telescopes, like reflecting telescopes, have a big dish to collect and focus data.
At the center of its dish, a radio telescope has an antenna which picks up radio signals.
Because radio waves are much longer than light waves, radio telescope dishes are very big – often as much as 100 m across.
Instead of one big dish, some radio telescopes use an array (collection) of small, linked dishes. The further apart the dishes are, the sharper the image.
The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) is made of ten dishes scattered all the way across the USA.
Radio astronomy led to the discovery of pulsars and background radiation from the Big Bang.
Radio galaxies are very distant and only faintly visible (if at all), but they can be detected because they give out radio waves.
Radio astronomy proved that the Milky Way is a disc-shaped galaxy with spiraling arms.

This entry is filed under Interesting Facts.