This past summer, as part of UPenn’s Summer Science Academy Program, 12 high school students along with James Aguirre, associate professor in the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Physics and Astronomy, turned an out-of-service TV satellite dish on the roof of the Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia into a 30-foot radio telescope. The telescope has been given the name “Philadelphia Community Radio Telescope.”
“Aguirre’s summer students first learned the basics of radio astronomy using home satellite dishes. The physical principles that allow them to collect radio waves and the electronics that amplify and manipulate them into pictures are the same, though size matters when it comes to what those pictures look like,” according to UPenn News.
“You end up getting a strip of sky that’s passing overhead. The idea is that we will make a website that shows what the telescope is looking at now, processing the signals being received in real time,” Aguirre said.
Partnering with the nonprofit organization, The Enterprise Center, was crucial in helping the students understand different electromagnetic waves that objects can emit.
“Aguirre’s own research, recently bolstered by an NSF CAREER Award, involves using arrays of hundreds of small, stationary radio telescopes to probe the early universe. For his high-school students, simply processing the images and stitching them together to get a glimpse of radio-wave-emitting galaxies was a sufficient introduction,” according to UPenn News.
“The way that radio telescopes work, it’s hard to get good images. For example, I’ve taken students up to the roof of Rittenhouse Labs with a 10-inch optical telescope and taken great pictures of a supernova; you can get a lot of high-resolution information with relatively modest equipment. But because the wavelengths of radio are so much longer, you need something like a 30-foot dish to get images that actually look like something,” Aguirre said.
Aguirre is taking the radio telescope project on the road to help the astronomy club at the Boy’s Latin of Philadelphia Charter school build their own satellite dishes. He plans to increase science students’ access to astronomy tools in the country.
“We wanted to make it so anyone can plug their electronics into either the big dish or the little portable ones. They can use it for undergraduate or high school classes, as well as demos and science outreach events,” Aguirre concluded.
