Fun Facts for Teachers and Students

You can help us name the Big Dish and make an important contribution to this amazing project helping us to explore the far edges of the universe and observe exciting cosmic events like exploding stars and eruptions on distant planets!

Signals from the dish might raise concepts like:

What are stars and planets?
What is radiation?
How far away are the stars?
Why did our ancestors arrange stars in constellation patterns?
Is there life in space and what do you think alien life might look like?
What might a distant planet look like if you were to land on it?

Below are some fun and interesting facts to help you with your name for the Big Dish.

Fun Facts about the Big Dish:

Radio telescopes work in the rain! Unlike optical telescopes, which need clear skies to operate, radio telescopes operate effectively in wet and stormy weather conditions.
A dish almost the same size (34m) is operated for educational purposes by NASA!
The world famous Arecibo Dish is a much bigger version of Ireland’s dish and starred in the James Bond movie Goldeneye.
There are only a handful of these dishes worldwide; this is the only project of its kind in Ireland, and will be the largest radio telescope available for educational purposes in Europe.
The 32m is a third the size of a football pitch or seven average cars laid end to end.
The diameter of the Big Dish is the equivalent of 20 average sized 1st year students lying head to head.

The Science of the Big Dish:

Radio telescopes work by detecting radiation, which is similar to the light we see with our eyes, but the wavelength of the radiation is millions of times longer than visible light and so is not visible to us, nor can we actually “hear” it with our ears. The radiation that is detected by the radiotelescope can be converted into sound, just as we convert the radio waves from satellites into pictures and sounds.
The sound will represent an ear on the universe that operates 24/7, 365 days of the year. That’s a significant advantage of radio astronomy over optical.
Radio telescopes can detect objects towards the edge of the observable universe. Even travelling at the speed of light (which is 300 million kilometres every second) it would take 10 billion years for the most distant signals to reach the 32m. This is a thousand trillion times the distance between the earth and moon.
The 32metre antenna dish in use as a Deep Space Radio Telescope will be capable of detecting a host of cosmic phenomena including: emission of giant slow moving hydrogen clouds, the violent explosions of stars, eruptions of the solar surface and storms on Jupiter to the enormous galaxy-scale jets of quasars.