Celestial Signals: Are Low-Noise Amplifiers the Future for Millimeter-Wave Radio Astronomy Receivers?

Abstract

Radio emission emanating from celestial sources was first detected by Karl Jansky during the 1930s. Using primitive radio instrumentation coupled to a relatively small aperture telescope, Jansky mapped portions of the Milky Way and established the field of radio astronomy. Thus was born a branch of modern astrophysics that has allowed the study of radio emission from cosmic sources and revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Additional Information

© 2017 IEEE. We gratefully acknowledge the expertise of Dr. Jacob W. Kooi from the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) for helpful discussions. We also thank Dr. Eric Bryerton from Virginia Diodes Inc., Dr. Lorene Samoska from JPL, and Dr. Mikko Varonen from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland for providing the data displayed in Figure 8. The work of David Cuadrado-Calle was supported by the Science and Technology Facility Council of the United Kingdom under grant ST/K502182/1.

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