New Receiver Will Triple Radiotelescope's Capacities

A giant 84-foot radio dish going into operation this summer at the Harvard College Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory will triple the station's power to gather radio waves from distant parts of the universe.

The new antenna will replace a ten-year-old, 60-foot dish now in use at the Observatory's radio telescope center at Agassiz Station in Harvard, Mass. The addition will double both the area the sensitivity of the Observatory's radio system.

With a surface machined to within a tenth of an inch, the new dish will also greatly broaden the range of radio wavelengths which the telescope can detect.

The existing antenna--one of the smallest still used for research--works only up to a frequency of 1600 million cycles per second, Arthur E. Lilley, director of the station, said yesterday. The new antenna and a battery of receivers now under construction will move that range up to 5000 mc/s.

Many of the most important radio sources in space broadcast in this higher range, Lilley said. For the first time, Harvard astronomers will be able to listen in on waves produced by heated hellum, oxygen, and carbon in vast clouds of gas between stars.

Radiation from charged pairs of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Lilley said, could be especially significant. Finding evidence of this material could indicate that vast quantities of organic compounds are being formed naturally in space. So far, however, astronomers have been unable to detect such radiation.

William A. Klemperer, professor of Chemistry, is now attempting to pinpoint the exact position of this radio band in the laboratory, he added. When the new antenna begins operation, radio-astronomers will try to find the same band in the sky.

The expansion of the station will not interfere with plans now being made at Harvard and M.I.T. for the world's largest moveable radio dish, 400 feet or more across. Construction on this project is still many years off, Lilley said.