Japanese | Word of the Day

Whats up yall,

From just glancing at the title, you already know what it is. Lets get to our random word of the day. If you haven't already heard, the Event Horizon Telescope has released its first image of a Black Hole from the center of galaxy Messier 87, 53 million light years away.

I should establish that the Event Horizon Telescope isn't one single telescope but an array of 8 different radio telescopes spread across the globe working in unison. The telescopes use atomic clocks to stay in perfect sync, each collecting bits of data, later processed by supercomputers to collectively form the single image shown above.

As a science nerd, I was lowkey excited to read about this news and impressed at the advances technology has made over the decades since Einstein's first predictions regarding General Relativity. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Today's word is 電波望遠鏡/でんぱぼうえんきょう/denpabouenkyou or "radio telescope". Lets breakdown these kanji.
電波望遠鏡

• 電/でん/den: electricity
• 波/ぱ/pa*: wave
• 望/ぼう/bou*: ambition, hope, desire, expect
• 遠/えん/en*: distant or far
• 鏡/きょう/kyou*: mirror

Its a long word, but sometimes these kanji compounds make the most sense to me. Even with the inclusion of "望/ぼう/bou・hope" among these kanji, I would imagine anyone looking through a telescope would be hopeful to see something fantastic or new. As for the addition of "鏡/きょう/kyou・mirror", traditional telescopes did use mirrors and lenses so, electrical or not, its inclusion within the compound makes total sense. The other kanji functions and definitions are pleasantly quite straightforward, so I'll skip their explanaitions.

*Beware: The pronunciation of these kanji may change depending on context.

What did you think upon hearing the news? Do you have interest in astronomy or space in general? Whats your favorite space flick and did it have an accurate portrayal of a black hole? (Mine is Interstellar btw) Leave your thoughts in the comments down below. As always, don't forget to like and share this post~
​
Until next time,
Peace