Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) tagged posts

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter view of Schiaparelli landing site

NASA’s MRO has identified new markings on the surface of Mars that are believed to be related to ESA’s ExoMars Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing technology demonstrator module. Schiaparelli entered the martian atmosphere at 14:42 GMT on 19 October for its 6-minute descent to the surface, but contact was lost shortly before expected touchdown. Data recorded by its mothership, the Trace Gas Orbiter, TGO, are currently being analysed to understand what happened during the descent sequence.

In the meantime, the low-resolution CTX camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) took pictures of the expected touchdown site in Meridiani Planum on 20 October as part of a planned imaging campaign...

Artist impression of the Schiaparelli module after the parachute has been deployed. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Essential data from ExoMars Schiaparelli lander sent to its mothership Trace Gas Orbiter, TGO during the module’s descent to the Red Planet’s surface yesterday has been downlinked to Earth and is currently being analysed by experts. Early indications from both the radio signals captured by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an experimental telescope array located near Pune, India, and from orbit by ESA’s Mars Express, suggested the module had successfully completed most steps of its 6-minute descent through the martian atmosphere. This included the deceleration through the atmosphere, and the parachute and heat shield deployment, for example.

But the signals recorded by bot...

An image of the deep radio map covering the ELAIS-N1 region, with aligned galaxy jets. The image on the left has white circles around the aligned galaxies; the image on the right is without the circles. Credit: Prof Russ Taylor

Deep radio imaging by researchers in the Uni of Cape Town and Uni of the Western Cape, in S Africa revealed supermassive black holes in a region of the distant universe are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction – most likely a result of primordial mass fluctuations in the early universe. The new result is the discovery – for the first time – of an alignment of the jets of galaxies over a large volume of space, via a 3yr deep radio imaging survey of the radio waves coming from a region called ELAIS-N1 using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).

The ...

This is an optical image with radio lobes (in yellow-red). The supermassive black hole in the red galaxy at the centre (zoomed in inset) has led to the formation of the giant radio lobes. Credit: Prathamesh Tamhane/Yogesh Wadadekar

Astronomers have discovered an extremely rare radio galaxy – a giant, with an extent of 4 million light years caught in its dying phase at an incredible distance of 9 billion light years. This discovery, made by combining observations of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, with other telescopes in space and on the ground, enables us to study properties of the magnetic field in the region between galaxies in the distant universe.

How do galaxies with an optical size of a hundred thousand light years produce radio emission several million light years in extent? I...