Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat did we learn from the Arecibo Radio Telescope?
Daniel and Jorge tell the story of the construction, the scientific insights and the collapse of the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico
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Hey Daniel, do you like seeing big science experiments appear in movies.
You know, I love it.
Because it's true to life and accurate.
No, actually it's the opposite. Usually it's all like slick and fancy. They got retinal scanners and heads up displays. It's nothing like the messy desks and dirty coffee cups of reality.
So it's not realistic. Doesn't that bother you?
No, it inspires me. It shows me how cool my workplace could be. You know, a fancy version of the control room at CERN was in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, and when I saw that, I thought, ooh, let's make that real.
Sounds like physicists need Hollywood to come in and inspire you to clean up your dirty cups.
Somebody's got to do it.
I am Hoorhem, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I actually am able to watch science in movies without criticizing it too much.
Do you have to actively force yourself not to be a grumpy physicist when you watch movies?
No? Not usually, although if they mentioned the Higgs boson, then I'll admit my ears are perked up and my critical brain is turned on.
Mmm.
That must be why the movies never mentioned the Higgs boson.
Actually, I feel like movies throw the Higgs boson in all the time when they just totally don't need it.
I want to see what's on your Netflix queue that talks about the Higgs boson all the time.
Probably I'm more sensitive to the Higgs boson than most viewers.
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
We mostly talk about the real universe, the one that's out there that we all want to understand, the one that has neutron stars and black holes and active Galacti nuclei and all sorts of other crazy stuff that we are desperate to wrap our minds around. We desperately want to understand, we want to take them apart, and mostly we want to explain them to you.
Yeah, because there is a lot in the universe for us to wrap our heads around, in our civilizational reach. Because it's a big universe, and there's a lot that we still have to discover and to learn about and to make movies about.
And we are doing our beds to figure it out. We have all sorts of different kinds of devices that we use to listen to the sky. We can hear X rays, we can hear gravitational waves, we can hear new treos, we can hear radio waves. We do everything we can to get as much information from the sky as we can to reveal those secrets of the universe.
Yeah, because our search for the truth and the inner workings of the universe is sort of like a movie. It's a drama, you know, with a first and second act and maybe a big twist at the end.
Ooh, which actor we in right now?
According to you, we're in the first act, still trying to figure out what the characters want.
I feel like we might be in the trailer.
You know.
This is like in a world where scientists have no idea what's go going on?
Do physicists have trailers? Do you have to make one for each experiment?
I recently did see somebody put out a paper and they used iMovie to make a very dramatic trailer for it, and I thought that's a pretty good idea. It really did make me want to read the paper.
Really did it have the voice?
He did? It had the voice?
Paper published to be published.
In a journal coming soon to a library near you, explosions inclusions. No, I do feel like it is a story. We are unraveling the biggest mystery in the universe, which is the whole universe. The amazing thing is that the universe seems to have a story, one that we can understand. As we chip away at it and reveal a little bits of it, it seems to sort of click together into an understanding that works for our minds, which is to me one of the biggest questions in philosophy, like why is the universe even understandable? Why is it possible for the human mind to wrap itself around this incredible, potentially infinite variety of stuff in the universe.
Yeah, And so physicists are hard at work and sciences are heart at work and on all those answers. And at the same time, there are artists and filmmakers and writers creating movies and fiction and stories that portray that universe, maybe sometimes in interesting and fantastical ways.
Yeah, and sometimes you see real science experiments making a cameo in the movies, which is always fun, but maybe even more fun is seeing the future, is seeing like what artists and creative people imagine science could be doing for us deep deep in the future. We're just the role of science in life in a thousand years or in two thousand years.
What it could be doing for us and to us potentially usually to us or you know, what we taste like sometimes, So on.
The podcast, I've sometimes gently criticized a few movies that I like to kick around because of science and them was a little wonky Interstellar for example. But we had a listener who wrote it and asked us which films and TV shows we actually do like. So Grant Jendo from Scotland wanted to know what we like to read and enjoy and are we able to switch off the academic part of our brain to just enjoy things. So, Orge, what do you like to watch? And are you able to turn off the engineer inside you and just enjoy it?
Oh that's a tough one. No, I'm not able to turn off my engineer inside of me. Anytime I see a movie, I'm like, wait a minute, how did they make that work? Or where do they get the power to wait ratio to accomplish that kind of flying. But generally in terms of science, I guess I can't turn my head off. You know, somethings it's so ridiculous that you kind of have to. Like I just watched that movie cong Versus Godzilla. Yeah, totally realistic science in every aspect of each character and special effect.
Especially the gravity in version, very realistic.
Totally the center of the Earth right with instead of Sun in there. I don't know, it wasn't quite clear, but you know, flying King Kong, who doesn't want to see that? With an ax that glows?
That was a lot of fun. I also enjoyed that movie, and I was able to turn off my science brain and just sit back and say, show me the moss fighting for me. I really enjoy a movie or a TV show where I don't have to turn off my science brain, but where the science is part of the plot, like where they have a scientific mystery and they are trying to unravel it, or they're limited by science in the way that they can solve a problem. To me, a great example is The Expanse. The Expanse is this TV show that takes place in the future and it's all over the iner and outer Solar System, and they have lots of real physical constraints, like you can't just get from here to there really quickly or you can't send a message from Earth to Jupiter instantaneously, and that really plays a role in their lives and influences the choices they make in a cool strategic way. So I really enjoy seeing the science play a role in that show.
I hear it's really scientifically accurate when they throw people off of the airlocks, which apparently happens more often than they kill characters in Game of Thrones.
That's right, it's basically the space Game of Thrones.
Well, are there space dragons?
There are aliens, yep, there are monsters, but there aren't actually space dragons. No, you should write that one though.
There you go. I'll sit in my CV.
And promise that you'll get the weight to strength ratio correct for your space dragons. You bet, I will accurately engineered space dragons.
So those are the kinds of movies that you like, the ones that are kind of make scigence realistic or they make it part of the plot. Is that kind of what you mean?
Yeah, And you know I don't have to only watch something that has science in it. I like movies also where science doesn't play a big rule in the show, et cetera. I saw Wolf Walker's Last Week with My Family, which is beautifully illustrated animated movie where they draw each frame by hand, really has no science in it at all, but you know, gorgeous and well told and wonderful characters. So yeah, my family likes a lot of stuff cool.
Well. One of my favorite science movies is Contact, or maybe my only science movie is Contact with Jodi Foster.
That's a great one.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's based on a book written by Carl Sagan and directed by Robert Sebekis. It's a good movie overall.
And it's got aliens and maybe even realistic engineering problems.
Super realistic I think in terms of kind of like what it takes to build some thing and with an international collaboration, And I thought that was all pretty well done.
And what it's like to read specs written by aliens.
Right and solve puzzles like embedded by aliens? Right?
Are these in meters? Are these in inches? What even units are these? Do we make this thing a thousand times too big? I always thought that was an interesting question about those specs.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting that Carl Sagan wrote that. I mean, it's friction, so he was an astronomer but he wrote that piece of fiction, and he'd sort of tried to put in as much science as possible, but does sort of get a little bit fantastical at the end, right.
Yeah, it totally does. It starts out very well rooted in the science, how you would hear a message from aliens, how you might decode it, how you might decide it was from aliens. But then of course he felt free to imagine what those aliens might be like and their intergalactic transport system and all that stuff. It's a great movie. I really encourage everybody to go out and see it.
And so one of the stars of that movie is Matthew McConaughey, who was also the Interstellar.
By the way, Daniel, he and I are friends.
Good, all right, she have him come on the podcast, all right, all right, all right? She can wax poetically with random strings of words. But another one of the stars of that movie is a science experiment. So at one point in the movie, Jodie Foster is in Puerto Rico and she basically hangs out near the Arecibo Observatory.
That's right, This is a huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that in the movie they use to hear the message from aliens and in real life is a real thing that does real science and has four decades.
Yeah, it's a very big dish and it has been around for a long time, but it is no longer around. Something happened to it, unfortunately, and it is no longer doing science.
That's right. The era of Arecibo is now over, unfortunately.
So we thought it'd be cool to dig into this amazing instrument and a little bit into the history and also what happened to it. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what did we learn from the our receivo telescope.
Yeah, this dish really played a huge role in radio telescopes and also just sort of in like the cultural understanding of astronomy. It was like, it's such a big thing. I feel like it must have played a role in lots of people's lives, and since it recently was destroyer fell apart, felt like the right time to do sort of like a tribute episode to talk about everything we've learned.
And it's a pretty or maybe one of the most famous astronomical instruments or radio telescopes in the world. It was in that movie contact. I've seen it in other movies, and it had a big role in the movie GoldenEye, one of the James Bond movies.
Yeah, except they weren't really doing science with it. They were just sort of like running around and chasing each other and shooting each other, cooping, kaping. Pretty goofy actually, but yes, it was in there. It was sort of like a backdrop. It was like a part of the.
Set because it is a pretty spectacular thing. And so we'll get into some of the specs of it and where it is and how they build it. But first we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this radio telescope and what they thought of it.
And specifically what they thought it has taught us about the universe and aliens.
So, as usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the Internet and asked people what do we learn from the Aracibo Telescope?
Thanks to everybody who volunteered, and if you would like to participate and speculate on a topic you don't know anything about, or maybe you do, please write me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
Here's what they had to say. I've not actually heard of that, So, as a complete guest, was it the CNBA. If they are a feeble radio telescope is in Spain, then we have learned to a lisp.
Otherwise I have no clue.
I don't know.
I know what telescope it is, and now which the one in Puerto Rico that's.
Broken, but I have no idea what it is famous for.
Actually, I haven't really heard about it. But since it's a radio telescope, maybe some signals from pulsars or something like that is what I assume.
About it.
I'm not sure. I think. I think at some point we detected a fake response to the Arecibo message that was broadcasted into space. But in regards to what actual scientific discoveries we made, I have no idea.
I don't know any one thing we learned using the Arecibo radio telescope, but I mean radio telescopes look at things really really far away, so I guess we learned something about something that's really really far away.
I think the Arecibo radio telescope was used initially to investigate the cosmic microwave background, but eventually was used for the SETI investigations.
I haven't heard about any major breakthrough down this at Receivo, but I know it was used a lot in monitor near small objects like space debetes and small miquiros and comets and so on.
I'm not even really sure what, Like, I've never heard of that telescope, but you know radio and it's telescope, so I'm assuming it's probably something.
To do with astronomy.
Maybe someone was like taking a look at like radiation from stars or something, and then.
We found something cool to do with stars. Quite possibly, I don't know.
All right, it sounds like people knew about it, but they didn't know exactly what it had done for us.
Yeah, exactly, sort of out there. It's famous, the name means something to people, but not everybody really knows like what we've learned and what the actual science that aercibu can do.
Yeah, and so let's get into that. But first nance talk about the dish itself. So it's a big dish, Like that's why they put it in movies because it's so impressive. It's like, how wide is this dish?
It's a thousand feet wide, so it's a really big thing. And remember that this is the kind of telescope that collects a huge amount of light and then focuses it on a receiver. So it's sort of like a satellite dish you might have in your backyard or on your roof, except it's much much bigger, so they can collect much much more energy and focus that all on a central place and gather that information into a signal for the astronomers.
It's just a little bit bigger than the one people have in the roofs, you know, just a thousand feet that's like three soccer fields.
Right, Yeah, it's a thousand feet wide, and the whole thing weighed nine hundred tons, so it's really this massive piece of equipment.
And it's in the middle of Puerto Rico, right, And they had to put it out in the middle of nowhere, right to avoid noise, So it's like out there in the middle of the jungle basically.
Yeah, it's out there in Puerto Rico, and they had to find a spot, as you say, that was sort of quiet, right, It wasn't surrounded by microwaves and Wi Fi and cell phones, but they had to find a spot that was sort of near a town. And in Puerto Rico, they have these funny rock formations that are almost sort of like natural dishes. And so they picked like a bunch of different holes in the ground, and they found one that was sort of close to a city and sort of far away from everything else, and they just like picked one and built it there.
Yeah, and so they basically just kind of cord the ground with a giant dish, right, And so I always wonder, like, how does that move? Like, if you want to point your telescope somewhere in particular, how do you move such a giant dish.
You don't move the dish at all. The dish is fixed right as you say, it's huge. It can't move, it's attached to the ground. But what you can move is a little receiver. So to have this platform that actually is that's the thing that weighs nine hundred tons and it's suspended by cables above the dish. And so if the platform moves, then you're sampling a different focus point. So the dish itself is not a parabola. Parabola has like a single focus point. It's a sphere, and a sphere has lots of focus points. So if you move where you're gathering the light from, then you're basically focusing on a different direction, So you move this thing around and you can look in this part in the sky or that part in the sky.
Yeah, because I guess the way these dishes tend to work is that you have this giant sort of circular, you know, sort of spherical dish, and that gets light from space and then that reflects it back to a single point where you sort of gather it and collect it.
And if it's a parabolic shape, then all parallel light comes in and focuses at the same point. And that's how a lot of telescopes work. But then to point it in different directions, you have to turn the parabola. But this one's a sphere, so it doesn't focus all the light at the same point. It focuses all the light from one direction at one point and all the light from another direction at a different point. And then you can move the platform, the thing that actually gathers that light, to decide which light you want to gather today. So you don't move the dish underneath, you just move this platform above it that's collecting the light.
Yeah, it's like on a crane, and then it moves around. But I guess it still has sort of a limited range right, Like you can't point it sideways or you know, do a full three sixty. You sort of have a limited range.
You have a limited range, and you can't look for example, through the Earth or you know, backwards. But the Earth sweeps around right, and the Earth moves around the Sun and it rotates, and so using that you can get a pretty good sample of the sky because the Earth itself is.
It's sort of like the Eye in the Death Stark. You know, you have to wait for the death start to turn around before they can fire on the rebel base.
Yeah, and you know, like the Eye and the Death Star. It actually was also motivated by military contract.
Really, yeah, it wasn't science originally, it was not science.
No, it was sold to the US government in order to detect ICBMs in the upper atmosphere in the height of the Cold War. They built this thing in the sixties, back when everybody was worried about the Soviets nuking US and we were trying to figure out, like I could get early warnings of missiles coming in. So they pitched this to the government as like this would be a great way to get early warning signals from intercontinental ballistic missiles coming at us.
No way.
Really, it has its origins in war, wow, or I guess prevention of war or you know, early warning of war.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a lot of physics is motivated by defense technology. You know, I grew up in Los Almos, New Mexico, so I'm steeped in this sort of like moral quagmire myself. But a lot of times to get something funded, you have to convince the government that it's important. And sometimes the government thinks that defense and military is more important than like a radio astronomy and unraveling the secrets of the universe.
And did it also have sort of like construction delays, And did dark beaeder have to come in and shape people up to get him going?
Those grad students disappointed him for the last time. No, it was built pretty well and pretty efficiently, and it's become sort of a point of pride for Puerto Rico. And at the time it was the largest single aperture telescope in the entire world. The biggest one that existed before that one was only two hundred and fifty feet wide in Manchester. So this thing just like dwarfed everything else when they built it.
All right, Well, let's get into a little bit more of how they build it and why they built it in Puerto Rico, and then let's get into the science of it and what actually happened to the Racibo telescope. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the Aricibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, at the time, the largest astronomy telescope in the world.
The largest single aperture telescope. You can make a sort of a larger effective telescope by stitching together a bunch of small telescopes and then using them together to make like an effectively larger telescope, but a single aperture telescope, but that's collecting a coherent source of light. This is the largest one in the world at the time.
Mmm, I see, is it still or at the time that it was still up, was it still the biggest one or are there bigger ones now elsewhere?
There actually is now a larger telescope. The current number one in the world is a five hundred meter telescope, so that's about fifteen hundred feet. That's in China.
And so this was built during the Cold War and to detect nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. And I guess why did they build it in Puerto Rico.
Well, they wanted it to be in the tropics so they could see like a larger portion of the sky because, as you say, you can't steer it, and so you want this thing to be sort of like swinging around and see more of the sky. If you're like at the North Pole always pointing up, then you're basically not taking advantage of the Earth turning. And they also wanted to study the Solar system, and so if you're in the tropics and you're sweeping around, you can basically get a view of the whole solar system at some point, and you know, Hawaii and the Philippines were a little too far away. And there was also one enterprising Puerto Rican grad student at Cornell who advocated to put it in Puerto Rico because he thought that would be good for Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans and science, and so he basically made that happened.
Wait what really a grad student.
Yeah, there was an engineer at Cornell, William Gordon, who headed up the project, but there was a Puerto Rican grad student at Cornell who talked to him and influenced him and told him all about Puerto Rico and why it would be a great place to build this thing, and made it happen.
I think of all the tostons you can eat when you're there, and all this sudden, all the sucks are dancing you can do at night. It'll be awesome, it'll be a good party.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the United States doesn't control that much territory in the tropics, and Hawaiian Philippines, again, we're too far away, and so it sort of seemed like a good choice.
Cool, So they sort of found like the right valley, like they had to find that like a valley with the right curvature kind of on it or did it matter.
Yeah, they did. And they looked at aerial photographs of Puerto Rico and they found like a dozen possibilities of holes in the ground that roughly had the dimensions they needed so they wouldn't have to like construct a free standing dish. And they just found one that was close enough to a town or a city and reduced it too a few And then this guy, William Gordon, he just went down there and looked at them and said, all right, we're building it here.
He planted his engineering flag there.
Yeah, it was back in the day when it was sort of like less red tape. You know, during the Cold War, the government just wanted to get things done. It wasn't so much about like bidding and contracts and review. They were just like, here's a pile of money, go build a thing. And it didn't mean the decisions were always the best, but you know, they were made more quickly sometimes.
All right, So they found this valley and then they built the telescope. And I guess what is the telescope made out of? Like how do you make the telescope, like you build the structure and what is the structure made out of?
Yeah, great question, because what it's looking for is light, but not visible light. If you build a telescope and visible light, then you need like mirrors and lenses, things that can manipulate visible light. But here we're looking for radio waves, which is just another kind of light. But you need to build your telescope, your lenses, and your mirrors out of things that can manipulate radio waves. Well, in this case, we just needed to be reflecting because it just has to hit the dish and bounce off and go to the central platform. And so for that you just need some kind of metal. And so they started out. When they first built it, it was just like a big wire mesh. But then later they replaced it with these perforated aluminum panels. So there's thirty nine thousand of these panels, each of which is like two by one meters that cover this dish. And they don't have to be complete, right, you can have holes in it. As long as those holes are smaller than the wavelength of the light that you're trying to reflect, it still works.
So the radio waves come in and then they hit the metal, the aluminum, and then they bounce back.
And then they bounce back because any kind of conductor does not like to have electromagnetic waves go through it. The electrons inside the conductor respond to electromagnetic waves and basically repel it. They create the opposite electromagnetic field inside themselves to basically reverse it. And so that's why, for example, silver is a good reflector of visible light. Also, but all sorts of metals and conductors are good reflectors of radio waves. That's why, for example, you can't get a cell phone signal in an elevator because it's a box made out of metal that repels and reflects all electromagnetic waves. It's a Faraday cage.
You just gave me some clusterphobia there. I think I've been in an elevator for over a year, to be honest.
Well, if you're one of those people who puts your cell phone in a little wire bag so that the government can snoop on you, or your wife or your husband can't tell where you are, it's the same principle, right. Any sort of metal surface or conducting service will not let electromagnetic radiation through it, will reflect it, and so here we're using that same principle to focus those radio waves into a single point where we can count them together.
Right if you're one of those people?
Right?
Not you, not at all.
I will neither confirm nor deny. I think they actually tracked me through my molars.
You have bionic molars or something?
Five G. I got five G through my molars.
Oh nice. You know that was an option. You didn't have to check that box.
I know. And now I pay every single.
Month every time you chew your fitbit tracks you're chewing too.
That's right, an email thing. I'm eating too much, or.
At least chewing too much. She try smoothies. But anyways, so they're perforated panels, and I guess that's good because it's a giant bowl in the tropic so when it rains, it doesn't get filled up with water.
It's basically huge astronomy calendar, right, like if you have a massive bowl of noodles, so you could use air sea boat to sort of like strength.
Okay, that'll be the next King Kong versus Godzilla movie. Like, we gotta feed King Kong noodles. What do we do? Let's go to Puerto Rico.
Maybe King Kong makes lunch for Godzilla, and he's looking for a calendar, and that's the only one you can find.
I see, it's not con versus Godzilla is Kan cooks for Godgzilla.
Or Godzilla is a conspiracy theorist and doesn't want the government to listen to his thoughts, so he uses the dish to sort of protect his brain, like a calendar.
See he picks it up and puts it on his head.
Yeah, like a tinfoil hat sort of.
Well, he is being tracked by the government, so I can totally see.
That it's good advice. Godzilla, listen to me.
All right, Well, let's talk about some of the signs now that the telescope has done over the years. And it does radio astronomy. He said, that's like a wavelength of light. Is it like a higher wavelength or a lower wavelength.
It's a very very long wavelength, so low frequency light radio waves are below the frequency that we can see with our eyes, very very long frequencies, and it's sort of a niche field in astronomy. Most of astronomy is like visible light or maybe infrared or X ray, and radio astronomy has for a long time been like a bit of a backwater you know, was invented sort of accidentally in the thirties by somebody listening for radio interference because they were trying to pass telephone calls across the Atlantic. And then for a while, like the only radio telescope in the world was one built by a random guy, a volunteer who's just excited about it and built a huge radio edition in his backyard. And so as of nineteen sixty, like, radio astronomy was really a fringe field, which is why probably they couldn't get millions of dollars from the government to build a huge radio telescope, but they did. And radio astronomy is fascinating and it can tell us different things about what's out there in the universe than visible light, because different things emit in the radio than they do in the visible light.
Yeah, I guess you know, when like a star explodes or a star shines, or something happens in space, it happens in all frequencies of light, not just the kind that we can see exactly.
But the temperature of those things also determines what frequency they emit at. Hotter things tend to emit at higher frequencies and lower wavelengths, so like X rays, for example, come from accretion disks near black holes, whereas infrared light comes from like planets and clouds of dust that are cold and don't actually glow in the visible light. And so radio waves are even longer, so they tell us about like cold or more distant things. They also weirdly tell us about black holes because black holes emit like all over the place. And that's actually how we discover that there was a black hole the center of our galaxy. Is that the first radio astronomy we ever did was we heard a huge radio signal from the sky that turned out to be from the center of the galaxy. And now we know that's coming from a black hole. So the sky in the radio looks different from the sky in the visible.
And I think radio waves also travel further, right, because they're longer, they don't get sort of deviated by little tiny bits in space.
Yes, because their wavelengths are so long, they're not as deflected by huge clouds of gas and dust. So as you say, we can use them to sort of like see deeper into the center of the galaxy for that reason.
And we could also sort of look at our own planet and study things like climate and the atmosphere.
Right, Yeah, we can tell like the composition of the upper atmosphere by bouncing signals off of it, and all sorts of stuff. We used it to also, like study like the van al and radiation belts. Member we talked about that once. Just by sending signals up into those belts and seeing like how they bounce back, we can tell what's there.
Yeah, and it can tell you about the atmosphere and other planets too.
Yeah. Absolutely, We've used it to like map Venus and Mercury because AIRCBO is super awesome and unique in another way because it's not only able to receive messages, but it can send messages. So we can like shoot radio waves out at Mercury and see how they bounce back, or shoot them at Venus and see how they bounce back, and that can tell us something about like the surface of those planets and the atmosphere of those planets.
Wait, what we've been shooting radiation at other planets? We have using the RCVI telescope.
Yes, we have. Well, you know, it's just radio wave. So like we broadcast a lot of stuff in the radio our civilization is very very noisy in radio, but using EUROCBO, we have specifically sent messages out into space, sometimes to probe other planets, also sometimes just to say hello to.
The aliens, like who there?
Or you up the new phone? Who is? We send a message in nineteen seventy four to M thirty one, which is a cluster about twenty five thousand light years away, and it describes sort of life on Earth and how it works and what we look like and where we are. And that was the message, and we just hope maybe somebody got it and doesn't come and kill us.
Yeah, here's hoping. But y one, what was there?
Well, we don't know if anything is there, but we got a signal from that direction in the sky a few years before. It's called the Wow signal. It was this weird blip of energy that came in and nobody understood what it was about or what it meant, and it was never repeated, so it's this sort of weird event that we've never really understood. It's a powerful signal that sort of looks exactly like what you might expect to see if aliens send us a message, But we don't know if there's any information in there. It was very short and it was never repeated, so we never really understood. So we just thought, hey, let's just shoot a message back in a space in the direction that that message came from and see what happens.
We used the o Receibo telescope to send that message.
We did reuse Aracibo exactly, so it's sort of like our interplanetary telephone.
Cool. And we've also used the telescope to look for other planets, right, exoplanets.
Yes, In fact, one of the very first discoveries of an exoplanet was made by Aricibo. Now these days we're discovering exoplanets all the time using this method called the transit method, where basically a planet like eclipses the star of the other Solar system and dips its light a tiny amount and we can use that to detect that that planet is there. But the first discovery of an exoplanet comes from Aricibo because it was listening to a pulsar. A pulsar, remember, is a neutron star, so like after a star has burned it collapse is down to a really dense little object, and if it's also spinning really fast and shooting beams out of its poles. Then we call that a pulsar because as it spins, it sweeps out a message across the sky and we see these pulses. So it's a really dense planet emitting these pulses sometimes in the radio, and so aercibo can listen to these pulses. And there was this one pulsar that had a planet around it, and as that planet went around it, it tugged on the pulsar and changed the frequency of the signals it was sending those pulses, and aercibul could pick that up. And this was the first clue we had that there actually were planets around other stars. This is nineteen ninety two. Wow, that's huge, right, Yeah, that was a big deal.
This telescope detected the first ever planet outside of our Solar system. That's a huge accomplishment in milestone for humanity.
Absolutely, it was really exciting. And now because we have better telescopes and we studied that same system in gory detail, we now know that there are actually three planets around that pulsar, and they're all really closely packed into this crazy pulsar. One of them is really tiny. It's like two percent of the mass of the Earth, but two other planets around this pulsar are four times the mass of the Earth, but they're all like within half the radius of the Earth's orbit. So it's a pretty crazy system. And yet a recibo gets the gold medal for being the first discovery of an exoplanet.
Wow, it's pretty cool. Were they looking for that on purpose or they just happened to notice this weird pulsar kind of wiggling strangely.
That's a great question. I'm not sure, but you know, I'm sure that they saw this pulsar and they saw it doing weird things, and somebody had a bright idea of thinking, hm, whatever, we could use this to detect a planet around that pulsar. And that's the method we use all the time now because it's very powerful. We can see sometimes planets around pulsars in other galaxies using this message, because pulsars are so regular and so precise that we can see very small deviations in their pulses when a planet moves around them.
Wow, that's amazing. All right, let's get into a little bit more of what cool signs a recibol has done, and also what happened to it and why it went down some years go. But first, let's stick another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the RCIBO telescope in Puerto Rico to shout out to Puerto Ricans.
Have you been to Puerto Rico?
I have not, No, but I've known a lot of Puerto Ricans. But yeah, it's a pretty cool dish in Puerto Rico, and it's huge, and it's been doing science for a long time, and right before it went down, it was helping us study big threats to the Earth too, right.
Yes, absolutely. Aercibo is sort of like a giant radar dish, so it can tell us about asteroids or meteors or comments that are coming near the Earth. And so it got its funding in its last days by looking for near Earth objects and trying to understand are they going to hit the earth. How big are they? How shiny are they? This kind of stuff.
Yeah, and that's a big deal because if we don't see an asteroid coming, it could be coming right at us.
Yeah, we think we know where most of those are, but there could always be surprises and nonlinear effects when like two asteroids get near each other and perturb each other. So it's very important that we're constantly scanning the skies and we don't have that many devices that can do this, and Aricibo was very helpful, and so we could like bounce radio waves off an asteroid and tell you, like exactly how fast it's spinning or exactly how big it was, And so this is really powerful.
And this is one of my favorite parts. It actually helped us study biology and plants too.
It did. Yeah, you know, biologists are very creative folks. And they discovered that this created sort of an accidental experiment because they were interested in whether plants could grow in the shade in Puerto Rico, and here's a huge dish under which they could actually crawl and study. Like the dish itself isn't just laying flat on the ground. There are supports so you can get underneath there and ask questions about like, you know, can plants grow under a dish where water can drip through but not a lot of light gets in.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah, So it sort of like changed the micro ecology of that one little hole in the ground.
And also nobody could tell what those plants were thinking because they were shielded by it from radio.
Waves, that's right. But most importantly, Aerciba was really important in data that was used to make a discovery that won a Nobel prize.
Oh no, kidding, what was it discovered?
Well, again, it was a study of pulsars because Aricibo was really good at seeing these things. And there was a grad student there who was studying these pulsars and he accidentally found a system that had two pulsars, so two of them orbiting around each other. And actually saw him present his research ones and he talked about the day that he found this thing and he almost, very nearly threw this thing in the trash because it looked weird to him, but then he decided to dig into it a little bit and it turns out it was in fact two pulsars, which is really interesting and important because it lets you measure something about general relativity. If two pulsars are orbiting each other, then they're slowly falling in towards each other, the way like two black holes slurp each other in or two neutron stars. And these days we know that those things emit gravitational waves because we've seen the gravitational waves. But back then in the seventies, we couldn't see gravitational waves. But to see binary pulsars slowly moving towards each other was suggestive of the fact that they were emitting gravitational waves. So they made a really precise measurement of these binary pulsars showing that they were moving towards each other exactly as general relativity predicted, and that won the Nobel Prize in nineteen ninety three.
No kidding like that, before we could even possibly even detect gravitational waves, we could prove that they existed.
This was sort of indirect evidence that they existed because the energy had to be going somewhere. This showed that these two things were falling in towards each other and were likely emitting energy. They didn't detect the gravitational waves themselves, but it had to be going somewhere. This was like really nice, solid but indirect proof of gravitational waves. And I saw actually talk by this guy. He was a grad student. He made this discovery and sort of nobody paid attention for a while, and he actually didn't get a faculty position anywhere. He was working like in computing in a physics department, and then boom, out of the blue, Nobel Prize and Princeton calls him up and they're like, so would you like one office or two offices? And so, you know, sort of like a big change in fate for this one grad student to win the Nobel Prize based on his pH d thesis years later, Right.
Yeah, big change. He could have been a rich telecom executive by now, but no, he's stuck in some office in Princeton.
Yeah. I don't think we need to feel any sympathy for all.
Right, Well, it sounds like the Receival Telescope in Puerto Ricas has had a pretty illustrious scientific career. It detected the first binary pulsar, discovered ice pols and mercury and other planets, and detected the first ever planet outside of our Solar system, and it's done all these amazing things. But it's no longer in service right.
In fact, it is not. And one problem is that it's sort of old and it's been around for a long long time. And NSF has this sort of strategy to like mag room for new, big projects. What they do often is sort of cut old projects. Even if those old projects are still producing good science and everybody loves them and they're doing good things and they're even like promoting diversity in science. Still they're sort of like not as exciting as a new, shiny project. And so in the two thousands, NSF started to make budget cuts for Puerto Rico, delaying maintenance and support and this kind of stuff to make room for all their exciting new projects.
So that started kind of in the two thousands, right.
In the two thousands, and then they really had to like stitch the money together they keep the place running. And that's when they started to do these asteroid studies, which Congress said was really important. So nas to give them a few million bucks a year to keep Aerceba running if they could like monitor for asteroids. But it was always sort of like you know, on a shoe string, and at the end there they were like relying on a lot of clever engineers because they didn't have a lot of money, and so every time something broke, they had like sort of rig something up mcgiver style. They couldn't just like go buy.
Something little duct tape, yeah, little super glue yeah.
And when you get to that phase of an experiment, you sort of know that, like any big blow, it might be the death of your experiment because you just can't recover from it.
And so it started to lose funding and started to not get maintained as well, which I guess made it not as useful. Then at the same time.
Right, yeah, people were still doing great science with it. They were able to keep this thing going and it was still collecting data, Like the dish itself was still in great shape. Really, the issue is this platform, right, this platform is a huge nine hundred ton steerable thing hovering over the dish, supported by cables, and that's a little precarious, and the instruments on it also need to be kept up and running. You need to be able to position it precisely and move it back and forth. And so that's was really sort of the weakness the Achilles heel of Airsibo.
Yeah, and then something happened, unfortunately.
And then something happened. You know, everybody was really worried during Hurricane Maria, of course for all the perto Ricans, but also for this dish, because like a huge hurricane seems like bad news when you've suspended a nine hundred ton object on cables above your dish, but it actually survived, like it passed through Hurricane Maria no problem. So that was like a huge sort of astronomical global sigh of relief. But a couple of years later, there was this long series of earthquakes in Puerto Rico, and those really damaged the supporting structures that held up those.
Cables, and then one day things just kind of snapped.
Things just kind of snapped. Exactly in August of twenty twenty. One of those cables failed because you know, the cables were getting old, and as the tower sort of leaned the wrong direction, the stresses get greater and greater, and so the first cable snapped and it left this like one hundred foot gash in the dish. And that could still work, you know, the dish works by reflecting the light to the center. Doesn't really matter if you have like one scratch in it. It's sort of like if you're looking through a telescope. Somebody can put their hands sort of in front of the telescope and you might not even notice because you're gathering light from lots of different directions. So even though this one cable failed in twenty twenty, in August, they thought, well, this isn't the deathnell. And the NSF actually said all right, you guys can fix it. Here's some money to fix it. So people thought, oh, yeah, Aercibo's gonna survive.
Yeah, and so they fixed it.
But then what happened, Well, they were planning to fix it, and they were working on like organizing those repairs, and then in November of that year, a second cable broke and they thought, all right, well this is it. We can't repair two cables. And so then it was November nineteenth, twenty twenty, the NSF decided, Aercibo, thank you for all your contributions to science. We're done. They didn't think it was worth repairing anymore. Oh yeah, that was sort of goodbye to Aricibo. And then just a couple of weeks later, these two remaining cables that were holding up this whole platform by themselves they snapped and the whole platform fell into the.
Dish, just like in GoldenEye, just.
Like in GoldenEye, and it shattered the dish. And there's video of this, like because they have obviously cameras monitoring it, and so you can go online you can see this video. But I know that a lot of Arisibo scientists feel very emotional about that dish. You know, it's like generation span, Like you could have done your PhD there and then have your PhD students get their degrees on that dish. And people love that place, and so I know that a lot of folks who work there refuse to watch that video. It's like triggering for them.
It's like a giant platform that just fell on the dish and through the dish kind of right, it's pretty catastrophic.
Yeah, you'd have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. The dish is destroyed, the platform is destroyed, cables are destroyed, like everything is just toast. It's it's just a huge mess.
Just add that to the long list of terrible things that happen in twenty twenty.
Exactly twenty twenty. We're glad you're behind.
Us, all right, but it has an amazing legacy behind it, and you know, thousands of papers and Masters thesis and PhD thesis and amazing discoveries. And so we are hats off to you, are Receival Telescope.
Absolutely thank you for all your contributions and for teaching us so much about the universe. And it's not the end for radio astronomy, maybe not even the end for radio astronomy in the United States. People are out there proposing sort of like the next generation Arisibo, a bigger, better telescope that would be even larger dish and could teach us even more because they could capture signals that come from even further away and so they're even fainter when they get here.
Yeah, they're proposing bigger dishes, right, like half a billion dollar dishes.
Yes, half a billion dollar dishes. And who knows, you know, if we can spend billions of dollars on this, and maybe we can also spend billions of dollars looking at the sky and listening for messages.
Just film the next Avengers movie on your experiment and that will pay for itself. Probably that's true.
What would you rather have one more Avengers movie or a huge radio telescope. Don't answer.
That depends what if you can get like King Kong in there too, versus e.
Kong versus the Avengers. Yeah, if that would fund it, that's what they should do. They should write a script that requires the construction of a huge scientific device just as a prop for the movie, and then afterwards they could actually use it.
Yeah, get Dan Brown to write that feature the Avengers, King Kong and Godzilla and make sure it has Matthew mcconachie on it, and you're all set.
Boom. This is our new plan for funding science.
For saving science. All right, Well, thank you to all the scientists I worked on Aracibo and who made that happen. We really appreciate it and we hope you enjoyed this episode. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
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