On post-SKA radio astronomy

It is suggested that the development of the SKA will drastically change the face of radio astronomy in the 21st Century. A FAST-style SKA would admit observations of low contrast features, and would be the best design for studying the `dark ages' of the Universe (x≫ 1) where sub-arcmin total power instruments can usefully be employed. To date there have been no proposals for post-SKA, billion square-metra instruments; we speculate that mobile communication systems can be used. In the very distant future, SKA multi-beam systems could be used to collect signals reflected by Solar system bodies such as the asteroid belt. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Early Cambridge radio astronomy

Radio astronomy started in Cambridge immediately after the hostilities of the World War II have ceased. Martin Ryle was the inspiring leader of a small group that started to develop interferometry techniques at the Cavendish Laboratory. From this development came the numerous Cambridge radio source surveys culminating in the Nobel prize awarded to Martin Ryle for invention of aperture synthesis. The history of this early development is the subject of the present paper. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

The development of radio astronomy

Following the detection of extraterrestrial radio waves in 1932 by Karl Jansky, radio astronomy developed quickly after World War II. It established itself soon as a new branch of astronomy with today's outstanding record in the detection of new phenomena in space. These have been honoured by a number of Nobel prizes. Radio astronomy largely depends on technical developments in receiver technology, antenna systems, electronics and computing power. Ever shorter wavelengths down to the submm‐wavelength range became accessible, resulting in new exciting discoveries. However, now and in future care must be taken, in particular for the lower frequency range, of harmful man‐made interferences, which might mask the weak signals from space. New international facilities with orders‐of‐magnitude higher sensitivity like ALMA and SKA are planned or under construction. Space‐borne observatories like PLANCK will detect weak fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, which will constrain cosmological models with an unprecedented accuracy.     

Space-based aperture array for ultra-long wavelength radio astronomy

The past decade has seen the advent of various radio astronomy arrays, particularly for low-frequency observations below 100 MHz. These developments have been primarily driven by interesting and fundamental scientific questions, such as studying the dark ages and epoch of re-ionization, by detecting the highly red-shifted 21 cm line emission. However, Earth-based radio astronomy observations at frequencies below 30 MHz are severely restricted due to man-made interference, ionospheric distortion and almost complete non-transparency of the ionosphere below 10 MHz. Therefore, this narrow spectral band remains possibly the last unexplored frequency range in radio astronomy. A straightforward solution to study the universe at these frequencies is to deploy a space-based antenna array far away from Earths’ ionosphere. In the past, such space-based radio astronomy studies were principally limited by technology and computing resources, however current processing and communication trends indicate otherwise. Furthermore, successful space-based missions which mapped the sky in this frequency regime, such as the lunar orbiter RAE-2, were restricted by very poor spatial resolution. Recently concluded studies, such as DARIS (Disturbuted Aperture Array for Radio Astronomy In Space) have shown the ready feasibility of a 9 satellite constellation using off the shelf components. The aim of this article is to discuss the current trends and technologies towards the feasibility of a space-based aperture array for astronomical observations in the Ultra-Long Wavelength (ULW) regime of greater than 10 m i.e., below 30 MHz. We briefly present the achievable science cases, and discuss the system design for selected scenarios such as extra-galactic surveys. An extensive discussion is presented on various sub-systems of the potential satellite array, such as radio astronomical antenna design, the on-board signal processing, communication architectures and joint space-time estimation of the satellite network. In light of a scalable array and to avert single point of failure, we propose both centralized and distributed solutions for the ULW space-based array. We highlight the benefits of various deployment locations and summarize the technological challenges for future space-based radio arrays.     

Suggestions for some single dish radio astronomy standards

In this paper we examine the possibility of adopting standards within the context of radio astronomy and the benefits to be derived thereby. In particular we consider the application of standards within the three areas of the receiver hardware, the control and communication between different parts of the observing system, and the interface with the astronomer. The adoption of such standards will increase flexibility of observing systems, allow the easy interchange of equipment between observatories and greatly simplify guest observing. In this paper we will only consider the application of standards within the field of millimetre-wave and sub-millimetre-wave single dish astronomy. However, the principle can be easily extended to other astronomical wavebands. We describe some current developments at the Onsala Space Observatory which illustrate the proposed philosophy and show how such standards may be implemented. Naturally, the detailed definition of such standards would have to be agreed in conjunction with other interested astronomical institutions.     

The faint radio sky: radio astronomy becomes mainstream

Radio astronomy has changed. For years it studied relatively rare sources, which emit mostly non-thermal radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. radio quasars and radio galaxies. Now, it is reaching such faint flux densities that it detects mainly star-forming galaxies and the more common radio-quiet active galactic nuclei. These sources make up the bulk of the extragalactic sky, which has been studied for decades in the infrared, optical, and X-ray bands. I follow the transformation of radio astronomy by reviewing the main components of the radio sky at the bright and faint ends, the issue of their proper classification, their number counts, luminosity functions, and evolution. The overall “big picture” astrophysical implications of these results, and their relevance for a number of hot topics in extragalactic astronomy, are also discussed. The future prospects of the faint radio sky are very bright, as we will soon be flooded with survey data. This review should be useful to all extragalactic astronomers, irrespective of their favourite electromagnetic band(s), and even stellar astronomers might find it somewhat gratifying.     

GPU accelerated radio astronomy signal convolution

The increasing array size of radio astronomy interferometers is causing the associated computation to scale quadratically with the number of array signals. Consequently, efficient usage of alternate processing architectures should be explored in order to meet this computational challenge. Affordable parallel processors have been made available to the general scientific community in the form of the commodity graphics card. This work investigates the use of the Graphics Processing Unit in the parallelisation of the combined conjugate multiply and accumulation stage of a correlator for a radio astronomy array. Using NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture, our testing shows processing speeds from one to two orders of magnitude faster than a Central Processing Unit approach.     

Coherent synchrotron emission observed: implications for radio astronomy

Synchrotron radiation by relativistic electrons spiralling in magnetic fields is a mainstay of radio astronomy, accounting for emissions from many objects. Conventional models assume that electrons radiate singly, so power scales with number of electrons. Yet recently jets from active galactic nuclei have shown very high luminosity, inconsistent with plausible single-particle synchrotron emission. We report experiments showing that, by stimulating plasma instabilities with relativistic electron beams, one can induce increases in the synchrotron emission by factors of ∼10⁶. Enhancement presumably arises from coherent bunching of the relativistic electrons as they spiral in an ambient magnetic field. Polarization measurements suggest that electrons radiatively cooperate on scales of ∼6.6 cm. Radio telescope Stokes parameters may be able to reveal such polarization effects in high-brightness sources, a new observing diagnostic.     

Estimating the size of a radio quiet zone for the radio astronomy service

The size of a radio quiet zone (RQZ) is largely determined by transmission losses of interfering signals, which can be divided into free space loss and diffraction loss. The free space loss is dominant. The diffraction loss presented in this paper is described as unified smooth spherical and knife edge diffractions, which is a function of minimum path clearance. We present a complete method to calculate the minimum path clearance. The cumulative distribution of the lapse rate of refractivity (g _n ), between the earth surface and 1 km above, is studied by using Chinese radio climate data. Because the size of an RQZ is proportional to g _n , the cumulative distribution of g _n can be used as an approximation for the size of the RQZ. When interference originates from mobile communication or television transmissions at a frequency of 408 MHz, and $\overline {g_n } $ is 40 N/km, where the refractivity $N=\left( {n-1} \right) \times 10^6$ , the size of the RQZ would be 180 km for a mobile source or 210 km for a television source, with a probability in the range of 15–100% in different months and for different stations. When speaking of the size of an RQZ, the radius in the case of a circular zone is implied. It results that a size of an RQZ is mainly influenced by transmission loss rather than effective radiated power. In the case where the distance between an interfering source and a radio astronomical observatory is about 100 km, at a frequency of 408 MHz, the allowable effective radiated power of the interfering source should be less than ?30 dBW with a probability of about 85% for $\overline {g_n } $ equals 40 N/km, or ?42 dBW with a probability less than 1 % for $\overline {g_n } $ equals 80 N/km.     

Experimental study of a 45-MHz array for radio astronomy

The University of Chile transit radiotelescope is a 528-dipole array operating at 45 MHz. We present a comparison of an experimental study of the antenna radiation pattern with the basic theoretical pattern in three dimensions. We concentrate in the meridian plane diagram since this is particularly difficult to measure for an array like ours. The comparison shows excellent agreement. We have measured several important antenna parameters like the effective area as a function of zenith distance, the orientation of the plane of the array and the pointing accuracy. We include a detailed treatment of these subjects since not much information related to low frequency arrays for radio astronomy can be found in the literature. We discuss the importance of knowing these parameters in the preparation of the 45-MHz Sky Survey under way at the University of Chile Radio Observatory.     

Wide-band high linearity active dipole for low frequency radio astronomy

We have developed an active dipole that is intended for use in new generation low frequency array applications. The preamplifier of the active dipole has very high linearity (input IP2 = 70 dBm, input IP3 = 31 dBm) and low noise temperature (100?C360 K). The frequency dependence of the dipole impedance and the match between the dipole and preamplifier have been optimized to achieve Galactic noise limited operation. The ratio between the antenna temperature due to Galactic noise and the noise temperature of the preamplifier is 10 ± 1.5 dB over the whole 10 to 70 MHz range. The total cost of the active cross-dipole is 220 euro.     

VLBI at the Hartebeesthoek radio astronomy Observatory

The Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory has played a key role in the development of very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) in the southern hemisphere since 1971. This paper describes how the VLBI programme evolved and the instrumentation used. Contributions to high resolution mapping of compact radio sources are described, for both the Southern Hemisphere VLBI Experiment, SHEVE, and for Global networks, where HartRAO has made significant improvements in the N-S resolution. The unique geographical location of the telescope has been used to establish the terrestrial reference frame in the southern hemisphere and to measure tectonic motions over the past nine years. The Observatory has also been a fundamental station in extending the celestial reference frame defined by extragalactic radio sources to the southern hemisphere, and results of these programmes are given.     

The development of radio astronomy at Hartebeesthoek

The development of radio astronomy at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory in South Africa is described. The Hartebeesthoek site was established originally by NASA as one of three Deep Space Stations equipped with 26-m parabolic reflector antennas. It was first used for radio astronomy by South Africa in terms of the NASA host nation agreement which allowed for its use at times when the facility was not needed for its primary purpose of tracking space probes. After NASA withdrew from South Africa in 1975, the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research took over the site and the 26-m parabolic reflector antenna, which NASA had abandoned in position, and established it as a national observatory. The development of the facility to the stage where it could support a variety of observing programmes such as continuum observations and mapping, spectroscopy and pulsar timing is described as well as the role played by the Observatory in global programmes of very long baseline interferometry.     

Superconducting filter for radio astronomy using interdigitated, capacitively loaded spirals

A matched pair of microstrip spiral superconducting filters with centre frequency 357.5?MHz and 29.4% bandwidth has been developed for radio astronomy. The high coupling coefficients required for the large bandwidth have been achieved through interdigitating the spirals to provide a large interaction length, and by adding loading capacitors on the inner ends of the resonators, together with previously reported features. A low-pass filter has been cascaded with each band-pass filter to mitigate spurious responses. Measurements show 0.09?dB loss, thought to arise mainly from sources outside the filter itself, plus 0.12?dB maximum ripple.     

Site selection for a radio astronomy observatory in Turkey: atmospherical, meteorological, and radio frequency analyses

Selecting the future site for a large Turkish radio telescope is a key issue. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is now in the stage of construction at a site near Karaman City, in Turkey. A single-dish parabolic radio antenna of 30?C40 m will be installed near a building that will contain offices, laboratories, and living accommodations. After a systematic survey of atmospheric, meteorological, and radio frequency interference (RFI) analyses, site selection studies were performed in a predetermined location in Turkey during 2007 and 2008. In this paper, we described the experimental procedure and the RFI measurements on our potential candidate??s sites in Turkey, covering the frequency band from 1 to 40 GHz.     

Scalable desktop visualisation of very large radio astronomy data cubes

Observation data from radio telescopes is typically stored in three (or higher) dimensional data cubes, the resolution, coverage and size of which continues to grow as ever larger radio telescopes come online. The Square Kilometre Array, tabled to be the largest radio telescope in the world, will generate multi-terabyte data cubes – several orders of magnitude larger than the current norm. Despite this imminent data deluge, scalable approaches to file access in Astronomical visualisation software are rare: most current software packages cannot read astronomical data cubes that do not fit into computer system memory, or else provide access only at a serious performance cost. In addition, there is little support for interactive exploration of 3D data.We describe a scalable, hierarchical approach to 3D visualisation of very large spectral data cubes to enable rapid visualisation of large data files on standard desktop hardware. Our hierarchical approach, embodied in the AstroVis prototype, aims to provide a means of viewing large datasets that do not fit into system memory. The focus is on rapid initial response: our system initially rapidly presents a reduced, coarse-grained 3D view of the data cube selected, which is gradually refined. The user may select sub-regions of the cube to be explored in more detail, or extracted for use in applications that do not support large files. We thus shift the focus from data analysis informed by narrow slices of detailed information, to analysis informed by overview information, with details on demand. Our hierarchical solution to the rendering of large data cubes reduces the overall time to complete file reading, provides user feedback during file processing and is memory efficient. This solution does not require high performance computing hardware and can be implemented on any platform supporting the OpenGL rendering library.