Damaged Radio Telescope Leaves An Astronomical Legacy In Science technologytimes.pk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from technologytimes.pk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Arecibo Observatory was born in the mid-20th century from a confluence of earthly and celestial forces: William E. Gordon, the scientist who devised the massive radio telescope, wanted to study the Earth s upper atmosphere. The US federal defence agency that funded its construction aspired to dominate the technology race against the Soviet Union.
Ricardo Arudengo/AFP/TNS/Getty Images
This aerial view shows the damage at the Arecibo Observatory after one of the main cables holding the receiver broke in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. And so, between 1960 and 1963, in an era brimming with the idea of space exploration and Cold War tensions, a radio telescope of power and size never before seen was built in Arecibo, a coastal town in northern Puerto Rico.
DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Aerial shot of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which collapsed on Dec. 1. (University of Central Florida/National Science Foundation)
The legendary radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed on Dec. 1, sending shock waves throughout the astronomy and astrophysics communities. The telescope, the world s most powerful radar that was used by scientists for almost six decades to send beams to and receive signals from outer space to elucidate the ways of the universe, also is cemented in the history of the U.S. Department of Energy s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
It was at Arecibo in 1974 that Russell Hulse, a University of Massachusetts graduate student, along with his advisor, James Taylor, discovered the first binary pulsar - a pulsar comprised of two stars in very close proximity that rotate around each other. Hulse was a physicist at PPPL from 1977 to 2007 and Taylor became a Princeton physicist. Th
A starry sky above the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, taken on Aug. 4, 2020. University of Central Florida
For 57 years, the Arecibo Observatory, a radio/radar telescope facility located about 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of the city of Arecibo in Puerto Rico, was one of astronomy s great treasures.
Until recently, Arecibo had the biggest radio telescope in the world, and its ability to detect distant signals made it one of the world s most powerful tools for studying both planets and moons in our own solar system and mysterious objects in distant regions of the universe. Over the years, scientists used it to determine Mercury s rotation rate and map the surface of Venus, to discover the first binary pulsar and the first known exoplanet. Arecibo s researchers also made important findings about the properties and orbits of asteroids that are potentially hazardous to Earth.