Saturday 15 January 2011

H-R Diagram of radio astronomy facilities




This is the H-R diagram of radio telescope facilities, building on Stuart Lowe's H-R diagram for astronomers.

How is it constructed? The x-axis is the number of publications a telescope has produced in the last 10 years (via a search of the abstract of the ADS using both the abbreviated and full names e.g. VLA "Very Large Array". The y-axis represents the number of google hits for a specific facility, again using the same search string as in the previous ADS seaarch. This leads to some contamination that has been dealt with by specifying an additional search term e.g. "Parkes Telescope".

It seems that most radio telescope facilities fall on the "main sequence", a few are branching off into the realm of Stewart's "media stars" e.g. the Jodrell Bank telescope.

All the caveats referred to Stuart's original analysis probably apply.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

That's fantastic, very nicely done Mike! Why doesn't Arecibo make the list though?

Mike Garrett said...

I'll add Arecibo tomorrow.
I have a few more plots with other
facilities too, will post these if
people are interested and no one is
offended by current plot!

Nywla said...

Shouldn't 'IRAM' separate into both the 30m and the PdBI separately if NRAO isn't listed but GBT, VLBA and VLA are?

Brent said...

Great job, Mike!

Could you also add the SMA?
Based on the information from the director, SMA has 300 publications.
But we do not know your standard for
the google #.

Thanks,
Huabai

Alberto Conti said...

This is great work. As you mentioned Stuart's original idea, and our poster http://goo.gl/szBjS also point out some caveats.

Great work.