First Issue of Taikong

The Taikong magazines constitute the output of the Forums organized at ISSI-BJ. It reports the contents of the forum and reflects in a neutral way the discussions and advises from all the participants.

Taikong means outer space in mandarin and encapsulates Chinese  developments in space science. This first issue focuses on the Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry (SVLBI) candidate mission. Space VLBI can produce images with much higher angular resolutions than any other astronomical instruments, thus is a powerful tool for investigating interesting astronomical phenomena in many unique ways. Space VLBI systems with two antennas in space is a very ambitious mission. The planned observing frequency is up to 43 GHz (Q band), which is new to space VLBI. Combining this frequency with a baseline of up to 60,000 km, the mission would be able detect a launching point of the jet from a black hole situated in the central region of a galaxy. The envisioned Chinese Space VLBI system might even capture an image of the outer part of an accretion disk. Astronomical masers in our Galaxy and some external galaxies are also interesting science targets, in addition to a number of other possible ones currently being explored. The forum participants were very actively discussing these opportunities and they ended with several recommendations all reported in this magazine.

No 1.Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry Forum

by Xiaoyu Hong and Ken Kellermann

Published in March 2014

Link to the pdf file