Mapping the Galaxy with Radio Astronomy

Produced by Danny Ben-David; created May 4, 2015 This video is designed to explore the surprising utility of radio astronomy as a tool for learning more about the universe. The video's vocabulary and content are tuned for high school students and up. Radio astronomy is a fascinating chunk of physics, because it manages to obtain impressive amounts of data with little more than a telescope which looks like a satellite dish and some math. It also ties serendipitously with discoveries such as dark matter, for reasons which will hopefully be clear within the video. This video is part of a group of videos produced by ES.333 (Production of Educational Videos). For more information on radio astronomy, see the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's website (https://public.nrao.edu/radioastronomy/what-is-radio-astronomy). If radio astronomy interests you, consider taking Physics Junior Lab, MIT’s 8.13. It’s a tough class but all the data presented in this video was collected there, so it’s well worth it. Thanks to Graham Ramsay and Dave Custer for their endless patience and aid in bringing this project to fruition, and thanks to Sean Robinson, who advised the script on this project to make sure I kept it grounded in reality. Thank you to Manual Perez de Lema Lopez, for giving me permission to use animations from their simulator program, MTL3D (http://www.mpl3d.com/). And finally thank you to Austin Duffield and the W1MX MIT Radio Society for granting me access to film atop the Green Building. Music: "Groove Grove" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Milky Way (artist's conception): NASA - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA10748 Milky Way (animations): MPL3D - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rt7FevNiRc Milky Way (in night sky): Serge Brunier - http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080104.html Hydrogen Gas in Milky Way: Douglas Finkbeiner - http://astrometry.fas.harvard.edu/skymaps/halpha/ Oort, Kerr, Westerhout’s 1958 paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1958MNRAS.118..379O Keywords: astronomy, radio astronomy, Milky Way, galaxy, galaxy map, Doppler Effect, rotation curve, galactic rotation curve, dark matter