A Big Dish at the VLA Radio Observatory
影像版權與提供: Victor Bobbett
Explanation:
They are so large, they are almost unreal. The radio dishes of the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes might appear to some as a strange combination of a dinosaur skeleton and common satellite-TV receiving dish. Together, the 27 dishes of the VLA combine high sensitivity with high resolution, enabling a series of important astronomical discoveries, including water ice on planet Mercury, micro-quasars in our Galaxy, gravitationally-induced Einstein rings around distant galaxies, and radio counterparts to cosmologically distant gamma-ray bursts. Pictured above, a dish from the VLA was photographed last week near Socorro, New Mexico, USA.
說明:
它們大到有些不真實。極大陣列 (VLA)的電波望遠鏡天線碟，對某些人來說像是恐龍骸骨和衛星電視碟型天線的奇異組合。極大陣列共有27個天線碟，合起來它們具有高靈敏度和高解像能力，成就了許多重大的天文發現，包括發現了水星上的水冰、我們銀河系的微類星體、遙遠星系周圍由重力所引發的愛因斯坦環、以及和遙遠宇宙珈瑪射線爆發相對應的電波源。上面影像是一具在上星期拍攝的極大陣列碟型天線，地點在美國．新墨西哥州的Socorro鎮附近。
資料來源: Scientific American
Department of Physics, NCKU
