WHITE PAPER
v2.1 (upd 09/10/2020)
EXAMPLES OF RESULTS WITH SPIDER radio telescopes
SPIDER radio telescope allows you to make radio astronomy studies on many radio sources and to
record different types of results as
transits,
spectra
and
radio-maps
. Here you find a few examples of
studies recorded with SPIDER radio telescope.
Taurus A radio map:
Taurus A is the radio source in
Taurus
constellation that corresponds to
the Crab Nebula (M1), the
supernova remnant exploded on July 4,
1054 and noted by Chinese and Arabian
astronomers of the time. A
radio telescope is different from an optical telescope by many aspects:
one of these is that it collects radio waves from a single area in the
sky. Just to give an example, it's like having a telescope with a CCD
camera that comes with a single large pixel. In order to create radio
maps,
technique
consists in moving the antenna with small
movements and, for every sky position, record radio waves coming
from space
tracking the sky apparent movement. Then the SPIDER
antenna is moved to a new position and record the next pixel value. For every pixel, RadioUniversePRO
software calculates the total amount of radio waves captured and displays this value with a color based
on a color scale chosen by the user. RadioUniversePRO software allows you to point the radio telescope
to the precise sky position of the radio source, visualize in real time the bandwidth spectrum in
frequency so you can see if you have artificial signal in it (allowing you to filter these from your
recordings) and define radio map specifications.
With a 3 hours capture time, setting the following
parameters in RadioUniversePRO:
Map dimensions: 15 x 15
degrees
Pixel separation: 0,4
degrees
Integration time for every pixel: 5 seconds
The result is the map that we
show in the image.
You can easily see the increase of the signal at
the center of the map, corresponding to Taurus A
position. The increase in the visible signal at the
top right of the image is the Milky Way, in fact
Taurus A does not lie perfectly on the plane of our
galaxy but it is a few degrees away (as confirmed
by the radio map).
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