The bulk of us compare astronomy with either somebody in their backyard with a smaller scope or perhaps at an observatory or planetarium looking at the nighttime sky.  This is of course a function of the world of astronomy of course, a hugely popular part to be certain. So to the fledgling, the idea of radio astronomy seems strange.  There are two reasons for that.  First is that humanity are far more than ocular than audio bound.  And the second is that radio astronomy doesn't genuinely involve listening to the cosmos except to the extent that scientists who employ this sophisticated form of stargazing do not rely on visual examine to conduct their work.


To apprise what is genuinely breathtaking about radio astronomy, first we have to  how we view astronomy.  The frequencies of stars and different interstellar bodies, such as satellites, comets and even quasars are more numerous important to the boosting of the science of astronomy than the ocular or graphical representations that come to us from telescopes.


Light, evidently, is the natural phenomenon that empowers our ability to use our ocular confirmation system, e.g. our eyes to appreciate something, in this case the stars.  In traditional astronomy, where we exercise a scope with lenses and/or mirrors, we utilize this light that is being emitted from stars, or reflected by other planets or moons to consider the cosmos as we can with our personal eyeballs. Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles a second, pretty rapid in any estimation. So watching a star in the sky is really looking at light from perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago. Goes to show you how big a place our cosmos really is.


Now light itself is a pretty strange substance. A substance that can be described in two styles a wave and a particle, and as a wave it will have a frequency just as any other sort of energy. If you can imagine it in terms of radio waves as well, they are nearly the same. In scientific terms light, energy and sound are simply a few classes of the same thing, relative frequencies of energy that are emulating from a seed. 



Radio astronomy now gets into consider as more numerous interesting and especially important.  The range of frequency that light occupies in the big spectrum of relative frequencies is really pretty small. That being said, this also means that we can only examine a very small percentage of the cosmos out there because of the small amount of relative frequencies that light can relay to our oculi. Not to further blow your mind, when you search up into the night sky, and examine all those myriad stars out there, ok and several planets, your only seeing an incredibly limited portion of the macrocosm that actually exists. Frightening idea isn't it?


Radio astronomy uses refined sensor equipment to study ALL of the frequencies of energy coming to us from the macrocosm.  In that way, these scientists can discover everything that is going on out there and so get a precise idea of how the stars face, behave now and will behave in the future.



Movie lovers out there should now recognise that the volume by Carl Sagan that became a hit movie, titles Contact, is not the end all be all of radio astronomy (even though Helen Hunt is important!). SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestial Intelligence, is a prominent function of the radio astronomy subject of study, albeit a limited one though.  The larger goal of radio astonomy is the search for those items we are unable to consider with our visually dependent astronomers tools. Items like black holes, so called because they radiate no light whatsoever, and even the background signal radiation or noise from the very beginings of our universe are being studied, now how is that for learning about the nature of our macrocosm with radio astronomy.



This is important analyze that is perpetually ongoing in the domain of astronomy.  Our short presentation has done nada but touch the tip of the berg, as they say, so it would be important to continue forward if you feel the desire.   Once your reason increases, your burgeoning desire to learn more numerous about astronomy and perchance help grow the area of astronomy for the next generations.