The NOEMA radio telescope on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps now has twelve antennas, making it the most powerful radio telescope of its kind in the northern hemisphere. It is operated by the international institute IRAM, in which the Max Planck Society has a stake. At the inauguration ceremony of the telescope on September 30, Max Planck President Martin Stratmann was among the guests.
Eight years after the inauguration of the first NOEMA antenna in 2014, the major European project is now complete. Thanks to its twelve 15-meter antennas, which can be moved back and forth on a specially developed rail system up to a length of 1.7 kilometers, NOEMA is a unique instrument for astronomical research.
The telescope is equipped with highly sensitive receiving systems that work close to the quantum limit. During observations, the observatory’s twelve antennae act as a single telescope — a technique called interferometry. After all the antennas are aimed at one and the same region in space, the received signals are combined using a supercomputer. Their resolution of detail then corresponds to that of a gigantic telescope, the diameter of which is equal to the distance between the outermost antennas.
The respective arrangement of the antennas can extend over distances of a few hundred meters up to 1.7 kilometers. So the network works like a variable lens camera. The further apart the antennas are, the stronger the zoom: the maximum spatial resolution of NOEMA is so high that a mobile phone could detect it at a distance of over 500 kilometers.
NOEMA is one of the few radio observatories in the world that can record and measure a large number of signatures – i.e. “fingerprints” of molecules and atoms – simultaneously. Thanks to these so-called multiline observations, combined with high sensitivity, NOEMA is a unique tool for studying the complexity of cold matter in interstellar space, as well as the building blocks of the university. With NOEMA, more than 5,000 researchers from all over the world study the composition and dynamics of galaxies as well as the birth and death of stars, comets in our solar system or the environment of black holes. The observatory captures light from cosmic objects that traveled to Earth more than 13 billion years ago.
NOEMA has already delivered a number of important scientific discoveries and insights. For example, the telescope observed the most distant galaxy known to date, which formed shortly after the Big Bang. In addition, NOEMA recently measured the temperature of the cosmic background radiation at a very early stage of the Universe, a scientific first that should make it possible to trace the effects of dark energy driving the Universe apart.
Half-time mark for the NOEMA construction
Provided by the Max Planck Society
Citation: European Observatory NOEMA reaches full capacity with twelve antennas (October 3, 2022), retrieved October 3, 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-10-european-observatory-noema-full-capacity.html
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