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Recent Research Into Very Low Frequency Radio Emission?

-- | July 29, 2014

Question: Have a question about Long Wave emissions. NASA had two missions late 1960s -early 1970s, the RAE missions, looking for radio emissions in the long wave band. When looking for newer research, I cannot find any. Seems like the science community simply lost interest of these wave lengths (100-400 kHz). Why is it so, RAE showed that there is signal sources out there. — Kurt

Answer: Low-frequency radio astronomy, at frequencies from about 10 to 250 MHz, has been conducted at a variety of radio telescope observatories for many decades. Examples are the low-frequency 75 MHz observing system at the Very Large Array and the recently developed Low-Frequency Array for Radio Astronomy (LOFAR), which operates at 10 to 240 MHz. The very low frequencies that you refer to are sometimes used to measure solar flares or the radio emission from Jupiter (amateur radio astronomers sometimes make these sorts of measurements). I am not aware of any existing radio telescope observatories that operate at these low frequencies, though.

Jeff Mangum

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