Observing the Universe Through Radio

My senior thesis focused on obtaining and analyzing radio astronomy observations of three galaxies as a demonstration of labs to be incorporated in the radio astronomy class offered in Fall 2018.  We were granted time to remotely use the 20-meter radio telescope in Green-Bank, West Virginia.  We derived a rotation velocity vs. radius graph in M31 (the Andromeda galaxy), measured the amount of star formation and total mass in gas in M82, a galaxy known to have an excessive amount of star formation, and also measured the shape of the radio spectrum emitted by relativistic electrons in the nearby active galaxy M87. We compared our results to the literature and they were within reason, confirming our results.