What is Radio Astronomy?

Anyone who has ever seen a radio telescope – for example, the one in Effelsberg – quickly notices the differences compared to so-called optical telescopes, which many people know from observatories. The way radio astronomers observe objects also differs significantly from observations made with an optical telescope.

We are surrounded by electromagnetic waves of many different wavelengths. The visible light that we can perceive makes up only a very small part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. At longer wavelengths, infrared radiation borders the visible light; at shorter wavelengths, it is ultraviolet radiation. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths: they can range from just under a millimeter to more than a kilometer.

In radio astronomy, radio telescopes receive the radio waves emitted by astronomical objects, which are then decoded using receiver systems and computers. In this way, radio astronomers can make objects visible that would remain hidden in observations within the range of visible light – such as the black hole at the center of our Milky Way.

 

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