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Brookes, Rachel

The UBC Okanagan Physics pyramidal horn radio telescope was originally constructed by Dr. Jake Bobowski and students from the physics department in 2010. As part of my directed studies project, I have substantially upgraded the radio telescope to enhance its sensitivity and stability. Major improvements include the addition of a horn extension to increase the area of the aperture by a factor of four, the use of temperature-controlled Peltier coolers to minimize thermal noise in the low-noise amplifiers, refinement of the waveguide-to-coax adapter’s impedance match to 50 Ω, and the integration of RF isolators along the signal chain to minimize reflections. Although not yet implemented in the setup, a novel low-loss (< -1 dB) bandpass filter based on coupled loop-gap resonators was developed. With these upgrades, the telescope has been optimized to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio > 3 when monitoring solar transits. This improved sensitivity also allowed for the successful detection of the 21-cm line emitted by neutral hydrogen in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. Near 1420 MHz, a stable and repeatable signal was observed when the telescope was directed toward the galactic plane. The signal strength was strongest near the centre of the galaxy where a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* is located. This black hole is about 4 million times the mass of the sun and is surrounded by a dense cluster of stars.

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University of British Columbia. PHYS_O 448

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0448896

Science, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan); Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, Department of (Okanagan)

Undergraduate

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