For anyone else like me that wasn't sure what ATA stood for, this is not the ATA hardware attachment interface. ATA here is Allen Telescope Array: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Telescope_Array

Today I learned a new non-SI unit, the Jansky, abbreviated Jy, a measure of energy flux "equivalent to 10^−26 watts per square metre per hertz".

Can somebody explain why it is interesting to get a much-lower resolution image than the VLA provided? Is it sampling some property the VLA image does not? (E.g., 8+ GHz samples higher-energy processes.) Or is this an exercise in technique (one person doing the work of an institute?), or in extracting usable data from antennas not built for the purpose? Background and motivation would be helpful.

[Edit:] The previous paper is helpful: "Here we show a complete description of the interferometric pipeline, covering from the IQ output of the SDRs to the CLEAN images. Therefore, this experiment is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning about interferometry in radio astronomy."

Aside from the educational value, they're showing they can get 10% of the VLA's image quality with 0.0001% of the budget. That's not an inconsiderable achievement.

I guess that is covered under "an exercise in technique (one person doing the work of an institute?)". Thanks.

> Can somebody explain why it is interesting to get a much-lower resolution image than the VLA provided? Is it sampling some property the VLA image does not?

The ATA has less and shorter baselines, each made of much smaller collecting elements than the (E)VLA. Put simply, baselines bring resolution, collecting area brings sensitivity, and both are intricate (the longer the baseline, the more sensitivity you need).

Have a look also at VLBA techniques, which allow for even higher resolutions. Such a technique was used with the EHT to "image" the M87 blackhole.

Why do you say it's a non-SI unit? Seems to me it is. I mean, it's a derived unit, not a fundamental unit; but still SI.

I only quoted the Wikipedia page saying so. The component units are SI, but the 10^-26 factor looks arbitrary.

Thanks, somehow with the headline I was thinking about imagining the old Cygnus text editor running on a PC boosted at 8.45 Ghz and was intrigued but wasn't too sure what ATA had to do with it!

I similarly was thinking that this was about imaging an older Cyrus CPU…

Excellent! Love seeing walkthroughs of data processing of radio telescope arrays. I've long been ashamed that it just doesn't seem to "click" for me, but I keep trying.

This is so cool. Cygnus A is 756 LY away so the image is of something that happened 756 years ago. And how crisp it does look!

Others have already responded that it's much further away than that, and this is very good because they are extremely energetic events, possibly the most energetic type of events we have ever observed.

Just the jets of Cygnus A are 40000 light years long (nearly half the diameter of the milky way). Active galactic nuclei like Cygnus A have power outputs on the order of 10^35 watts, this is 10(!) orders of magnitude more than the power output of the sun, and it's a highly collimated beam rather than radiating in all directions, so the usual inverse square law doesn't apply.

If such an object were in our vicinity (< 1000 light years), a single sweep of the jet would obliterate all life on earth. I suspect it would be enough radiation to re-melt the rocky planets in the solar system and strip them of their atmosphere. Some of these objects are estimated to have consumed hundreds of stars every single year. Even outside of the jet, the amount of ionizing radiation emitted in every direction around such an object would likely be incompatible with life as we know it.

So, luckily the object is actually very far away :)

The usual square law still applies. Of course if you are inside the beam cone, it look way brighter than an object of 10^35 W should look at the same distance, but if you move twice as far away, the brightness will still drop to one quarter. And inversely if you are NOT in the cone it will look dimmer than an object of this intrinsic brightness should look. But the gain you get from bundeling the radiation into a cone instead of emitting isotropically is fixed and the scaling with distance is thus unaffected. Look up "effective isotropic radiated power" (EIRP) if you want to know more.

I think many people's first foray into understanding this is grokking the difference between dBi and dBd, and then understanding that "gain" in antennas is another way of looking at directivity.

The inverse-square law always applies at distances like this. But the GP's remark probably refers to the difference in intensity between slight changes in angle. I.e., if you are ten times as far away, but just a hair closer to the beam center, you might have more flesh ripped from your bones anyway.

Another way to say this is that inverse-square applies exactly on any exactly radial path. But, close to the beam, even an unnoticeably oblique path may yield radically different results. In real life, you rarely get exactness, so in such a circumstance you should be prepared to find intensity varying along a very different curve.

>The usual square law still applies.

Would that still be true for a light (or w/e) beam that is perfectly collimated?

Every finite width beam will have some divergence.

Is that a law or something?

I was thinking of a hypothetical case.

Yes, the so called diffraction limit. Has a lot of applications in optics.

>"Diffraction refers to various phenomena that occur when a wave encounters an obstacle or opening."

>In a vacuum.

Read more.

May I refer you to https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-no... ? Pay particular attention to the last paragraph:

> Achieving a truly collimated beam where the divergence is 0 is not possible, but achieving an approximately collimated beam by either minimizing the divergence or maximizing the distance between the point of observation and the nearest beam waist is possible.

You confuse theory w/ practice.

The diffraction limit is a well supported theoretical limit that is caused by the wave nature of light. There is ways to get around it in the near field (up to a few ten wavelength away from the source). But in the far field you can not get a perfectly divergence-free finite-width beam. [1] Nor can you focus a beam to a beam waist smaller than about the wavelength.

In practice the situation is even worse and you can't even get the performance that a perfect Gaussian beam would allow. We often express the performance of real beams by a thing called M^2 or beam quality parameter [2]. In some sense is measures how much wider the beam is than it needs to be, and this number is never less than one.

[1] Btw such a beam would have infinite brilliance. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_squared

>The diffraction limit is a well supported theoretical limit that is caused by the wave nature of light.

That's not written in stone yet, it's a good approximation but still falls down under specific conditions.

I don't think that's true. The flux cross section f(2r)/f(r) = 4 is derived specifically for an isotropic radiation source. You would need to re-derive it for whichever beam shape you want to model.

EIRP is describing that the total flux through a sphere at a given radius is constant regardless of the beam shape, but we are only interested in a specific cross section and are not accounting for the rest of it.

Sorry, but that is simply wrong.

And yes, the inverse square law is strictly speaking only true for point sources. But it is an extremely good approximation once you are much further away than the size of the source (a distance ten times the diameter of the source is usually totally sufficient).

I had to re-derive it for a perfect cone to be sure. You are correct; at a distance where the size of the cross section of the beam is significantly larger than the source, deviation from inverse square becomes negligible.

Cygnus A is 232 Megaparsecs away[1], which converts to ~756,830,000 light-years away. Because of the expansion of the universe[2], what we observe happened slightly more recently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_A

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe

There's a couple of zeros (6 to be exact) missing there ;)

It's 700ish million ly away.