Would someone please help me out here? I’m just a poor ignorant sodbuster. How do they “see” ANYTHING with a radio telescope? In living color, yet?! And if all this can be “seen” by that method, why did we have to mortgage the farm to put the Hubble telescope up there? Why do I smell smoke? And where’s that wind coming from that seems to be aimed at my butt?!
It actually works. Just because it's not directly detectable by our senses doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I thank God for the gift of science that He has given us. It makes getting treatment for injuries much less barbaric.
/johnny
The “color” comes from translating different radio frequencies into visible light. The wind is actually the same as our sun’s solar wind, but magnified a million-fold or something like that because the star hasn’t reached a stable equilibrium yet. It’s in the T-Tauri phase, swinging wildly between gravitational collapse and thermal expansion. All proto stars go through that early phase.
“Would someone please help me out here? I’m just a poor ignorant sodbuster. How do they “see” ANYTHING with a radio telescope? In living color, yet?!”
Light and radio energy are two different kinds of electromagnetic energy, and the can both be used to create an image. See the explanation at:
Try It At Home! Make a Radio Image!
http://www.gb.nrao.edu/epo/image.html
“And if all this can be “seen” by that method, why did we have to mortgage the farm to put the Hubble telescope up there?”
Each instrument records images and other data by using different parts of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy. What can be seen and recorded with one segment of the electromagnetic spectrum is different than what can be seen and recorded with another segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. Putting these different images and sets of data together like a giant jigsaw puzzle makes it possible to reveal the secrets of the cosmos which heretofore remained hidden when using only the spectrum of visible light.
Simple. You see radio waves, just a very narrow range of them, and call it “light”. We’re very good at seeing the radio waves we do perceive, which is why we put Hubble up. We know what we should see outside the range that we do see, so we can build machines to see that range of radio waves for us and translate it to what we can.
Think of it as a giant MRI in space - the image is reconstructed from the RF signal.