Science | Special Edition WWW.THE-INTELLECTUAL-MAGAZINE.COM 18 H umankind has turned its gaze towards the night sky since antiquity and wondered about the secrets of the Universe that we all inhabit. However, what we see with our eyes only tells us part of the story. With the technological advancements of electrical engineering and computing in the 20th century, the field of radio astronomy has revealed some of the most striking natural phenomena and images ever seen in science. The black holes at the hearts of distant galaxies, incredible rotational speeds of neutron stars, and beautiful cosmic jets (like those identified by University of West Indies students in inset image) have all been studied and cataloged with radio telescopes. The world class facilities operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO; https://public.nrao.edu/) and its international partners push the boundaries of science and technology with its astronomical instruments. The NRAO is a EXPLORING THE UNIVERSE THROUGH RADIO ASTRONOMY Dr. Brian R. Kent National Radio Astronomy Observatory facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Collections of antennas working in concert as an interferometric radio telescope use a technique called aperture synthesis - effectively creating an instrument that can have a diameter many miles wide - sometimes as wide as the planet Earth. e Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in the state of New Mexico, USA, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama desert of Chile routinely create high resolution images that reveal never before seen detail of planet forming disks, massive radio galaxies, and matter accreting around black holes. A major computational challenge faced by astronomers and computer scientists lies in the amount of data that are