I said before that I would write a post about acronyms in astronomy, and since I haven't made any breakthroughs in my project in the last week, here it is!
First, I need to make a distinction that I've always thought was pretty important, though others rarely share my opinion. An acronym is an abbreviation made from the first letters of a series of words that can be pronounced as a new word. An initialism is an abbreviation that cannot be pronounced as a word. Now we can start.
On any given day, I swear 10% of my conversations with people are made up of acronyms or initialisms. NRAO, ALMA, NAASC, REU, VLA, GBT, FIR.... The list goes on and on, so since it would be impossible for me to write a reasonably-lengthed blog post about all of the abbreviations used in astronomy, I'm only going to talk about the ones that are really important to my internship and the ones I think are really cool.
Let's start big and work our way down. NRAO. When people ask me what I'm doing this summer, I usually start by telling them I'm doing some astronomy research. Most people ask where, and I don't know if it's because I'm a lazy speaker or my quick response reflexes just haven't learned their lesson, but I always say "NRAO, in Virginia." The other person will inevitably ask what NRAO is, and I'll tell them it's the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and because they've already asked me three questions, they'll usually just smile and nod, even though they still have a slightly confused look on their face. NRAO is a federally funded research group founded in the 50's whose focus is (surprise!) radio astronomy. Oh, and it's a pretty freaking awesome organization.
ALMA, VLA, and GBT all stand for NRAO's different (arrays of) telescopes. ALMA--which is an acronym, by the way--stands for the Atacama Large-Millimeter/submillimeter Array and is located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It's a giant international collaboration with the goal of getting super high-resolution radio data from space. VLA--an initialism--stands for the Very Large Array (astronomers are really creative) and is located in Socorro, New Mexico. The VLA is the super famous (I'm using this term very loosely) radio telescope array that can be seen in movies like Contact, Terminator Salvation, and 2010, to name a few. The GBT is the Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. Its claim to fame is that it's the largest movable single-dish telescope in the world.
Now for some fun ones. One of the things that keeps me awake when I'm reading scientific papers is seeing all of the cool abbreviations. HERMES, GOALS, ZEUS, and SKA are just a few. My favorite, though, is ALFALFA. I saw this in a paper once and it immediately woke me up and kept me interested for the rest of the paper. ALFALFA is the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey to find more pulsars. (I know I just used an acronym in the description of an acronym, which is kind of copping out, but I couldn't find ALFA's definition to save my life. If you know it, please let me know!)
Like I said, there's no way I could talk about all of the acronyms and initialisms, because I'm pretty sure that that blog post would take years to write, let alone read. But now you (hopefully) know a little bit more than you did before. And please feel free to comment back with questions about abbreviations I mentioned but didn't explain or ones I didn't even name that you want to know more about! I'd love to help spread the knowledge.
Just FYI, I'm actually heading to do some observing with the GBT tomorrow, so you should definitely come back in a few days to read about those adventures!
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