Community of astronomers
‘We’ve detected the radio emissions given out by objects in space,’ says Dr Tim O’Brien of the e-Merlin project, ‘that’s equivalent to the sharpness of view that the Hubble space telescope gets.’ The e-Merlin project, based at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, has just received its first signal from space. With new 600km of high-speed optical fiber cables, e-Merlin connects the data received from seven telescopes spread over a distance of 217km across England, to generate incredibly detailed images from space. It’s significant for the community of astronomers worldwide as it is an international facility that researchers from around the world use on a regular basis

‘The reason we use a number of telescopes spread across distances,’ explains Dr O’Brien, who is a Senior Lecturer in astrophysics at Manchester, ‘is that when we use them all to look at the same object, at the same time, and then we bring the signals back together and combine them, it effectively makes a zoom lens.  The sharpness and the detail you can see is increased as you separate the telescopes by larger and larger distances.’

Equivalent of UK internet
Up until now the telescopes have gathered information together using microwave radio links, using a network of dishes. The trouble with this is that they couldn’t get back all the signals that the telescopes were gathering from space. ‘In fact,’ says Dr O’Brien, ‘it turns out that in terms of potential signal, we were throwing away 99 percent of the signal being received by the telescopes. It just could never make it back to Jodrell Bank.’ The optical fibers have a hugely increased bandwidth, he explains. ‘When it’s fully operating, and we’re getting data back from each of the seven telescopes, the amount of data arriving per second will be the equivalent data rate as the whole of the UK internet combined. Some tasks that were taking up to three years to do can now be done in a day’.

19 or 20 countries
While e-Merlin is significant in itself, the technology and techniques that have been developed will be applied in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, a big international project to build the next generation telescope,’ says o’Brien, ‘and it’s either going to be in Australia or Southern Africa. There’s about 19 or 20 countries involved in that and the design centre is at Jodrell Bank.’