1/17/2024 0 Comments Puerto rico telescope![]() ![]() In theory, were any alien life-forms to respond, we earthlings could discern their answer at Arecibo. The message itself-a series of bits and squares containing the numbers one through ten, the atomic numbers of certain elements, and a graphic of a double helix, among other scientific touchstones-was mostly symbolic, to mark the occasion of an upgrade to the telescope’s capabilities, but it captured the public imagination nonetheless. ![]() Not all radio telescopes can both receive and transmit: this was one more way in which Arecibo was special. The message was meant to celebrate human technological advancement, and, supposedly, to be decoded and read by extraterrestrials. In 1974, a team led by an astronomer at Cornell University named Frank Drake (which included Carl Sagan) put together the Arecibo Message, a radio transmission that was beamed to a cluster of stars more than twenty-five thousand light-years away. (They were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1993.) “One of the most difficult moments of my life.” Arecibo, she added, “was a place of unity for everyone who loves science on this island, and all of us who truly love Puerto Rico.”įor more than half a century, Arecibo was the world’s largest single-aperture telescope, its global reputation built on grand discoveries that matched its size: from the observatory, the presence of ice on the poles of Mercury was first detected, the duration of that planet’s rotation was determined, and the surface of Venus was mapped the first binary pulsar, later used to test Einstein’s theory of relativity, was found by astronomers working at Arecibo. Still, she told me, the end of Arecibo was somehow harder, more personal. ![]() She’d done a Facebook Live through a magnitude-6.4 earthquake. She’d covered Hurricane Maria and its harrowing aftermath, as well as dozens of lesser but still dangerous storms and the resulting floods or landslides. Monzón is a presence in Puerto Rico, a much beloved and trusted figure, as meteorologists sometimes are in places where reporting on extreme weather can be a matter of life and death. Even so, when the inevitable finally occurred, Monzón was stunned. Although the telescope seemed to have survived Hurricane Maria, in 2017, without serious damage, the earthquakes that followed had perhaps weakened components that were already suffering from decades of wear and tear. Monzón, along with thousands of other scientists and radio-astronomy enthusiasts for whom Arecibo held a special meaning, had been on high alert for weeks, ever since two of its cables had failed, in August and in early November. There were even biologists working at Arecibo, studying how plant life developed in the dim light beneath the telescope’s porous dish. It had played a role in the fields of radio astronomy and atmospheric, climate, and planetary science, as well as in the search for exoplanets and the study of near-Earth asteroids that, were they to collide with our planet, could end life as we know it. Accompanying the photo was Friedman’s message, which read, simply, “ Se cayó ”-“It fell.”Įvery year since Arecibo’s completion, in 1963, hundreds of researchers from around the world had taken turns pointing the radio telescope toward the sky to glean the secrets of the universe. On a normal day-on any day before that one, in fact-a shot from that back yard would have captured Arecibo’s nine-hundred-ton radio-telescope platform, with its massive Gregorian dome, floating improbably over the valley, suspended from cables five hundred feet above the ground. In the picture, a thin cloud of dust hovered just above the tree line the image was notable not for what it showed but for what was missing. ![]() Jonathan Friedman, an aeronomer who lives near the Arecibo Observatory, about an hour and a half from San Juan, had sent her a photo, taken from his sister-in-law’s back yard, of the brilliant blue Caribbean sky and the green, heavily forested limestone hills. Just before eight in the morning on December 1st of last year, Ada Monzón was at the Guaynabo studios of WAPA, a television station in Puerto Rico, preparing to give a weather update, when she got a text from a friend. ![]()
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