What is the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope?

Recently, a team of international astronomers provided scientific evidence confirming the existence of gravitational waves, all thanks to observations of pulsars.

India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), one of the world’s six largest telescopes, played an important role in finding evidence.

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What exactly is the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope? Learn the basics

The Large Metrewave Telescope is a low-frequency radio telescope that helps study a wide range of radio astrophysics problems, ranging from the nearby Solar System to the edge of the observable universe.

The telescope is located at Khodad, 80 km north of Pune. The National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) operates the telescope. NCRA is a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope is a project of the Department of Atomic Energy. It is affiliated to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

GMRT has a total of 30 fully controllable DIHS-type antennas, each with a diameter of 45 meters, distributed over an area of ​​5 kilometers.

Currently, GMRT is the world’s largest radio telescope, operating at meter wavelengths.

main target

The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope is an instrument used to study various radio astrophysics problems.

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First, the GMRT helps detect the extreme redshifted spectral lines of neutral hydrogen that are expected from protoclusters in the early universe, before they condensed to form galaxies.

Redshift represents the change in the wavelength of the signal depending on the position and motion of the object.

Another important goal of the GMRT is that it has proven to be useful for studying rapidly rotating pulsars in galaxies.

Pulsars are actually extremely dense, rapidly rotating neutron stars. We can think of pulsars as cosmic lighthouses. Like cosmic lighthouses, pulsars periodically send radio waves to Earth.

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The significance of GMRT

The telescope is a unique telescope that operates in a frequency bandwidth of 100 Mhz to 1,500 Mhz.

The telescope, which is renowned in India and in 30 countries, has proven to be helpful in understanding the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time. Understanding this evolution is not easy as it requires tracking neutral gas at different cosmic epochs.

As heated ionized gas from the medium near galaxies falls into the universe, the gas cools and forms atomic hydrogen.

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Next, it turns into molecular hydrogen, which leads to the formation of stars.

Atomic hydrogen emits radio waves at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. This means that wavelength is actually a direct tracer of the atomic gas content in the surrounding and distant galaxies.

Now, it’s important to note that this radio signal is extremely weak. It’s nearly impossible to detect radiation from distant galaxies.

However, using GMRT information, scientists recently detected a signal from a distant galaxy when the universe was no more than 4.9 billion years old.

Due to its large collection area and wide frequency coverage, the GMRT is proving useful for studying a variety of other problems at the forefront of astrophysics.

These studies include the study of solar and planetary radio emissions. It also studies the relationship between solar activity and problems in the interplanetary medium.

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Source: https://dinhtienhoang.edu.vn
Category: Optical Illusion