Customer Reviews

Interferometry and Synthesis in Radio Astronomy

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You can think of this as a course in very specialised antenna design. Certainly, the broad concepts would be immediately recognisable to any engineer who has built antennas. But here the sources that are being detected are at far reaches indeed. Correspondingly, the sizes of each radio dish far exceeds your typical antenna in industrial or military use.

Of course, the book points out that radio telescopes further enhance their resolving power by positioning these dishes at precise distances from each other, and adjusting the phases of incoming signals accordingly. To someone new to radio astronomy, one of the impressive achievements is that an array of dishes can thus be combined into one large telescope, spanning several kilometers.

The book then shows how this is taken to a logical limit of VLBI. Where arrays at different locations across the globe might combine their signals, giving a telescope comparable to the size of the globe, for greater resolution. A tribute to how engineering helps drive advances in pure research.