[♪♪]
Miles O’Brien: It’s an arresting sight deep
in the desert southwest -
intentionally miles from nowhere.
[♪♪]
Miles O’Brien: Welcome to the Very Large Array,
or V-L-A, as it is called.
It’s a complex of 27 massive antennas, all pointing skyward.
Claire Chandler: We use the Very Large Array,
which we operate from the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico,
to study the radio emission from the cosmos.
Miles O’Brien: With support from
the National Science Foundation, astronomers like Claire Chandler
are using this facility to observe the most dynamic,
cataclysmic events going on in the universe -
all by monitoring the radio signals they generate.
Claire Chandler: Anything that’s not at
absolute zero in temperature
has radio waves coming out of it, yes.
Miles O’Brien: Star birth, star death,
black holes, colliding galaxies -
these and more are all in a day’s work
at the V-L-A.
Claire Chandler: What the radio does is that
it reveals those physical processes in ways
that you simply can’t see in the optical or the infrared.
Miles O’Brien: You may be thinking the V-L-A
detects sound.
It’s like listening to the radio, right?
Not exactly, says Mark McKinnon, who oversees operations
for the V-L-A in New Mexico.
Mark McKinnon: There’s a bit of a disconnect
in that radio waves are not heard.
Acoustic waves are what we hear with our ears,
and that’s the distinction is a radio wave
is still a part of the electromagnetic spectrum,
just at a much longer wavelength
than what our eyes are accustomed to seeing.
Miles O’Brien: For non-experts,
interpreting radio images can be challenging.
They often look like a lot of blobs,
but to the trained eye, they have a lot to tell.
Consider this optical image overlaid with one
from the V-L-A.
Claire Chandler: This is actually an image
of an elliptical galaxy
that was observed with the Hubble Space Telescope.
So, the pink emission here that you see
is actually the radio emission -
all of this energetic plasma that’s being spewed out
of that supermassive black hole in the center of that galaxy,
which we would not even know about
if we didn’t have the V-L-A.
Miles O’Brien: Radio emissions can also
penetrate clouds of dust in space.
Claire Chandler: There’s a lot of dust
in the universe,
and so, you can see this a little bit
if you look at the Milky Way at night.
You can see dark dust lanes,
and what that is intervening dust between us
and the rest of the stars in the Milky Way
that’s basically blocking out the background light.
The radio penetrates that dust.
Miles O’Brien: A main focus
of Chandler’s research -
star formation, which happens inside vast clouds of gas
containing hydrogen and other molecules.
Claire Chandler: This is a simulation,
a computer simulation
of what we think the collapse of the molecular cloud
might look like and it was done,
it was published over 15 years ago now.
Miles O’Brien: See those swirls?
Astronomers theorized that this is
what star-birth looks like, but for a long time
they didn’t have actual observations to confirm it.
Advances in radio astronomy changed that.
This is an infrared image of a star forming region
in the Perseus constellation.
Take a look at these little protostars.
Here they are imaged with a radio telescope
called A-L-M-A.
Claire Chandler: You could see exactly those,
those swirl,
that swirling material just like the simulation,
and you know this was the first time we’d ever seen this.
Miles O’Brien: Chandler is interested
in how planets form too. Take this A-L-M-A image
that shows what astronomers think are protoplanets
forming around a star.
Claire Chandler: Where you’ve got the dust -
is that where the planets are forming
or is it in the dark bits?
So, after that, we pointed the V-L-A at it.
There was kind of an isolated clump on one side of that ring
that could possibly be a protoplanet in the making.
Miles O’Brien: Another big project
is the V-L-A Sky Survey,
a multi-year plan to scan the whole of the sky
that the V-L-A can see, three times over.
You can even track their progress online.
Claire Chandler: This is available
for the public,
and it’s overlaid on an all-sky optical image
though you can kind of find your favorite constellation
and see whether we’ve covered it yet.
Miles O’Brien: Observing time on the V-L-A
is a hot ticket. It operates on an “Open Skies” concept.
Anyone with a good idea can submit a proposal.
The best of those get a green light
and access to the Array free of charge.
Mark McKinnon: The science wins
as a result of this
because of this competitive nature of it.
I like the fact that it’s very democratic, it’s uniform.
It means that anyone who has a great idea
can use the telescope.
Miles O’Brien: Understanding the mechanics
of the universe
by deciphering its radio emissions.
For Science Nation, I’m Miles O’Brien.