Biggest Eyes on the Universe Get Makeover

Another key hardware upgrade is replacing the 1970s-era radio receivers with far more sensitive modern receivers that can also read more radio wavelengths. Fiber optics are also replacing the old wiring that tied the whole array together.

Faster Scopes, Missing Bands & Radio Lunacy

Fiber optics are central to another big upgrade of radio telescopes in Europe. In April, the 100-meter Radio Telescope Effelsberg in Germany was tied in via fiber optics to radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank in the U.K., Medicina in Italy, Onsala in Sweden and Torun in Poland

The new giant array is being called the fastest radio telescope in the world with a virtual dish that spans Western Europe. The supercomputer correlator that brings it all together is in The Netherlands and can swallow a gigabyte of data per second. That's 500 times what a household DSL line can handle. The resulting resolution is 100 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.

On another cutting edge of radio astronomy is a brand new international observatory that's under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) will look just at the under-studied shortest radio waves of the universe by combining signals from a field of 66 separate dish antennae.

"Most of the photons in the universe are in the wavelengths range that ALMA will receive," said Anneila Sargent of the California Institute of Technology. "This will be a tremendous advancement for astronomy and open one of our science's last frontiers."

ALMA is expected to see into what's called the Dark Ages of the universe -- a time when the universe's very first stars were forming. Visible light from that time has now been so stretched out that its waves are in the millimeter/submillimeter range.

"We know that every time in the past a new wavelength has been opened up…we have been surprised by entirely unexpected discoveries," said Sargent. "We expect the unexpected from ALMA."

Finally, there are plans to take radio astronomy to the only place near Earth where the radio waves created by Earth itself, and those created by humans, can't interfere with the cosmic signal -- the far side of the moon.

The Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) would involve hundreds of small radio telescopes covering two square kilometers on the side of the moon that never faces Earth. The entire observatory would be put in place by robotic vehicles.

Like ALMA and another array now under development in a particularly radio-quiet part of Western Australia, LARC would step even deeper into the Dark Ages with unprecedented resolution and interference.

But, whereas ALMA is under construction, and EVLA is taking shape before our eyes, LARC is a dream that won't break lunar ground until at least 2025, according to LARC's lead scientist Jacqueline Hewitt of MIT.

Related Links:

Larry O'Hanlon's blog: Earth Impacts

Irene Klotz's blog: Free Space

Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)

National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)

How Stuff Works: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)