Monday 1 August 2011

Russians launched the largest space telescope

While the Chinese are slowly being completed construction of the largest terrestrial radio telescopes, the Russians after decades of planning and preparation made ​​a radio telescope that will be because they will work in the universe have an effective size of the antenna thirty times greater than the diameter of our planet ...

The Russian radio astronomer named telescope was launched from Baikonur on Monday. As for making large telescope on Earth receivers usually used to connect multiple observatories into a larger network that effectively provides a much higher resolution, this will work for about the space associated with ground radio telescopes and will be the largest telescope ever built. His resolution will be ten thousand times better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Large and highly variable orbital path (which will be for five years because of the duration of the effects of gravity to elongate the moon 390,000 kilometers), along with powerful computers on Earth, will allow Russian scientists to obtain images of distant galaxies at very high resolution. Radio astronomer will be able to count on the celestial objects separated by an angle of only seven micro-arc seconds, which is 10,000 better than Hubble resolution.

Scientists from the Astronomical Institute Lebedev Physical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which managed the mission, hope to be with him, among other things, be able to peek into the event horizon of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 and study pulsars and radio waves emitted by water masers (molecular clouds water contained in the discs of galaxies).

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