Listening to cosmos in US desert
Laying on a remote desert area in southern United States, a radio astronomers observatory attracts researchers and tourists all over the world. Being one of the busiest telescopes on Earth, it serves as a facility where many important discoveries were made.
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array is a radio astronomy observatory located on an isolated high desert plateau in western New Mexico state of the United States. Situated on a dry lakebed on the plains of San Agustin at 2,124 meters elevation, it is encircled by mountains, making it an ideal spot to avoid the normal wireless interference from cities. It is extremely dry there, and the lack of humidity in the air also makes for a clearer radio signal.
The VLA was named to honor Karl Guthe Jansky, who is considered to be the US father of radio astronomy. Jansky was a physicist and radio engineer employed by Bell Laboratories to determine the source of interference to their overseas wireless communications. In 1933 he surprised the world’s astronomers by announcing that one of the sources was extraterrestrial — radio waves emitting from the gaseous center of the Milky Way galaxy. In the decades since, astronomers and engineers have advanced the science of translating these radio waves into observable images.
When the VLA first comes into view on the drive across the desert, the massive size of the array is very awe-inspiring. There are 27 radio dishes, each one 25 meters across and weighing 209 tons. The data from each dish is combined via a supercomputer, creating a singular radio telescope observation.
The dishes are arranged in a Y-shaped pattern, and are moved into different configurations on a network of railroad tracks to facilitate specific observation projects. Each of the three legs of the configuration contains nine dishes and can be moved from two-thirds of a mile (1.6km) to 23 miles in length. The configuration changes about every three to four months to accommodate the research schedule.
Featured in the 1997 movie “Contact,” where the facility received a radio transmission from an extraterrestrial source, the VLA became a popular tourist destination, with the number of visitors doubling after the movie premiered.
Despite its reputation in fictional pop culture, however, the VLA has made many real-world discoveries. More than 200 PhD degrees have been awarded because of research done there. The facility makes observations of many types of astronomical objects; quasars, pulsars, supernova remnants, suns and planets and black holes.
Dr Chris Carilli, the chief scientist for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said: “The Very Large Array is extraordinarily powerful, the most powerful radio telescope in the world, and we perform a tremendously versatile range of science. We study things, everything from the ionosphere, our own Earth’s ionosphere, right out to the very first galaxies in the universe and everything in between.”
In 1991, the VLA discovered ice on the planet Mercury. In 2011, astronomers found a black hole a million times bigger than our sun, 30 light years from our planet. The VLA also confirmed Einstein’s theory that massive objects could create a gravitational lens that bends light.
In 2011, an upgrade project resulted in the