How do telescopes detect elecromagnetic waves in space?

Question

This is a Science Project question. I looked on Google and Ask but no answers my teacher would belive i made up.
(Grade 6 Answer plz)

Answer 1

The same way they do it on earth. Radio telescopes work exactly the same way your radio or tv receive their signals: an antenna followed by a filter, an amplifier, usually another filter, then a local oscillator and a mixer, another filter, an automatic gain correction stage, possibly another oscillator, another mixer, a filter and then a signal detector or a digitizer which lets a computer read the signal strength as numbers.

I am not sure this is particularly helpful, but most receivers are superhet(erodyne) or double-superheterodyne circuits. Today much of this is done in software.

In case of optical telescopes you have a primary mirror, then a secondary, very often a tertiary, then a filter wheel and some image correction optics, then a CCD chip or array to detect the image. It's just like a large and complicated digital camera.

Answer 2

Simple. Light is an electromagnetic wave (so are radio waves), and a telescope is just a set of lenses to focus light.

Sometimes I shine a flashlight at my kids and tell them I am shooting them with my electromagnetic ray gun. Because that is what a flashlight really is, a device to shoot the type of electromagnetic rays that we call light.

Answer 3

To simplify the above excellent answer:
The same way your eyes do!
The human eye percieves electromagnetic waves (in the form of light (photons)). An optical telescope will recieve the same photons, (only, a LOT more of them!)