(May 25) After a period of inactivity due to restoration work of the 32 meters parabolic, the INAF radio-telescope of Noto (Syracuse) has started to work again and it is now part of e-VLBI, the largest radio-astronomy digital infrastructure. This is possible thanks to a fiber optic link connecting the telescope with a computer centre in the Netherlands which receives real-time data from all the world. “The international radio astronomy community asked for many years to re-establish the antenna of Noto,” says Mauro Nanni, from Italian National Institute for Astrophysics). “It is very important because it’s the only one in Europe with an active control of the primary mirror and with a unique location on the southern tip of the continent.” The radio-telescope of Noto and the one of Medicina, Bologna, are part of the European VLBI Network, a collaboration of the major radio astronomical institutes in Europe, Asia and South Africa which performs high angular resolution observations of cosmic radio sources a network of antennas for radio astronomy spread between Europe, Asia and now South Africa to observe celestial objects jointly creating a giant radio telescope with a exceptional resolution. This has been made possible by a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which combines the observations made by several radio-telescopes during sessions synchronized with atomic clocks. Until last week, data produced by the antenna of Noto could only be stored on magnetic tape or disk and then physically delivered to the center in the Netherlands, where they were processed in the following months. Now data flows through a fiber optic communication network and can be processed in real time along with the data coming from other antennas. (Red)
