"It's like you have seven fire hoses of data coming at you," Cordes said. In terms of sheer quantity of data, it is providing an abundance, spurring scientists to come up with new ways of sorting through and managing the constant torrent of information. We could use these systems to test the limits of the theory of relativity - and at the most extreme cases, to find gravitational waves."ĪLFA science is divided into three overarching surveys: the pulsar survey, a survey for sources of neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way and an extragalactic survey. "The expectation is that we're going to find some exotic objects. "ALFA is going to discover probably 1,000 new pulsars that we haven't seen yet," said former ALFA project manager Stephen Torchinsky. The pulsar search could lead to a deeper understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity. "We're doing things that are pretty unique to what Arecibo can do - playing on its strengths."Ĭordes uses ALFA to find and observe pulsars, massive rapidly spinning neutron stars that are ejected in stellar explosions, or supernovae. "You could very well say it's a new phase for Arecibo," Cordes said. It's a quiet revolution - but Jim Cordes, Cornell professor of astronomy and one of the principal scientists behind ALFA's conception, says the improvements are unparalleled. In just two years, ALFA has provided a wealth of new data, from comets passing near the Earth and giant clouds of gas in our own galaxy, to some of the most distant objects ever detected. The ALFA system of detectors and associated electronics, jointly built by National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) and Australian engineers, is slightly bigger than a washing machine and has seven feeds - making it essentially a giant seven-pixel radio camera that allows researchers to image large swaths of sky and search for such time-variable phenomena as pulsars seven times more efficiently than in the past. Now, well into an ambitious series of comprehensive sky surveys using the receiver, astronomers say ALFA is delivering spectacularly: both by fulfilling the potential of the observatory's 1990s Gregorian upgrade and ultimately by changing business as usual for researchers worldwide. When the Arecibo L-Band Feed Array (ALFA) was installed on a misty April morning two years ago, it promised to bring phenomenal new sensitivity to the Arecibo Observatory.
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