Facility type Technical Services, Laboratories & Equipment

Description High quality telescope enabling to map the Milky Way

The radio telescope has a 4.5m diameter dish and is equipped with a receiver that allows both continuum and emission-line observations. The radio telescope allows us to conduct observations during the day time as well as in cloudy weather. The Sun is an unremarkable star in the Milky Way Galaxy. The rest of the Galaxy is largely invisible to us in optical wavelengths because of obscuring cosmic dust. Nevertheless, with a radio telescope such as this, it is possible to map the Milky Way Galaxy in astonishing detail as the radio waves are unaffected by intervening obscuring dust clouds.

The telescope can also be directed towards high-energy sources within our galaxy, such as the Crab supernova remnant, and beyond, such as M87, the giant elliptical galaxy containing a powerful quasar at its centre