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Some of the antennas that belong to the Murchison-wide field array. | Credit: Icrar/Curtin
The sky is full of radio frequency disorders (RFI).
“astronomy faces an existential crisis, “said Jonathan Pober from Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, in one opinion.
SatelliteFor example, they urge the sky. The United Nations office for space matters counted 11,330 satellites in Earth Record from June 2023, and many more have been started since then. Most of these satellites are designed in such a way that they forward different communication via radio wavelengths. This has presented the astronomy community a problem.
“There are growing concerns and even some reports that astronomers may soon be unable to carry out high-quality radio observations Satellite constellations“Said Pober.
The problem is particularly relevant to telescopes such as the Murchison Widdle-Field Array (MWA) in Western Australia, on which Pober is the American science manager. The MWA consists of 4,096 antennas The universe‘s epoch of reilandation when the first Stars And Galaxies formed. However, because the MWA suddenly observes the entire sky, “there is no way to show off our telescopes from satellites,” said Pober.
Due to the randomness of RFI and the difficulty of pursuing such signals back on their sources, it has turned out that interference can be filtered in such a way to be an unsuitable task. As a rule, data records that are contaminated with RFI are simply thrown away – but this means that a lot of data is lost.
However, the case of a stray television signal has given the hope of astronomers that there may be a way to save some of this data.
The MWA is located in an 186 mile long round zone with a 300 kilometer -wide radio, but the telescope has consistently recorded television programs that should not be transmitted in the quiet zone. The origin of these programs was a mystery. “Then we hit it,” said Pober. “We said: ‘I bet the signal reflects a plane.'”
Cooperation with Ph.D. Student Jade Ducharme, also from Brown University, set out to prove the aircraft hypothesis. To do this, they combined two techniques to pursue the origin of the RFI-with “near field corrections”, in which the radio telescope focuses on nearby interference-producing objects and essentially enables the telescope to sharpen its focus on which focuses on desired object.
With a combination of these two techniques, Pober and Ducharms were able to trace a television signal back into a plane, which drove at 38,400 feet (11.7 kilometers) in height and a speed of 492 miles per hour (792 kilometers per hour). They even found that the television signal was on the frequency band used by the Australian digital TV channel 7. This signal was broadcast somewhere outside the radio quiet zone and the reflection of the aircraft.
Recognizing the source of the RFI opens the door to the modeled disturbance so that its pattern can be recognized and ultimately filtered out, which means that the data can be used for astronomers.
“This is an essential step to subtract the interference from the data,” said Pober. “By only identifying and removing the interference sources, you can preserve more observations, reduce the frustrating data loss and increase the chances of important discoveries.”
Following the source of the RFI into a passing plane was only the first step. The next step is to learn how to remove similar signals from the astronomical data. After that, the goal is to expand the technology in order not only to identify and remove television signals that bounce off aircraft, but also to remove signals from satellite -overhead. In view of the large number of satellites, however, this is a much stronger task.
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According to Pober, however, it is of essential importance if the radio astronomy is to survive.
“We have no choice but to invest in better data analysis techniques to identify and remove interference for people,” he said.
The analysis of Pober and Ducharm, as they followed the stray television signal back to the aircraft, was published on February 12th in a newspaper in the magazine Publications of the astronomical society of Australia.
