There are place names that are familiar to astronomers around the world: Palomar Mountain, Mauna Kea, and Paranal, for example. A village in the Eifel also has a magical sound – Effelsberg, internationally mostly “Äffelsbörk”.
As in California, Hawaii and Chile, one of the most powerful telescopes in the world is located here. The radio telescope with a diameter of 100 meters started routine operation fifty years ago today.
For a long time it was the largest mobile radio dish in the world. Even following half a century, it’s still number two.
Radio waves are not disturbed by artificial light or clouds. Therefore, high-quality observations can also be made from rainy Germany.
With the giant dish in a valley near Effelsberg, the experts observe, among other things, pulsars, rapidly rotating star corpses, cold gas and dust clouds in the cosmos and magnetic fields in the Milky Way.
In addition, the telescope is often connected to instruments on other continents in order to look even more clearly into space, for example into the cores of active galaxies billions of light years away.
The imposing device weighs more than 3000 tons. The area of the bowl is larger than that of a football field, but the greatest deviation from the optimal shape is less than half a millimeter – engineering skill.
The interface has been renewed since it went into operation, and completely new receivers have also been added. The steel structure may be half a century old, but the telescope itself is state-of-the-art.
