Monday morning early, a cable hung over the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico broke and left a 100-foot-long hole in the dish of the iconic radio telescope. The 3-inch-diameter cable also caused damage to the panels of the Gregorian dome that hung hundreds of feet above the dish and contained the telescopic receivers. It is unclear what caused the cable to break as if radio astronomers using the telescope could resume their research.
“This was a help table that was used to support the weight of the platform, and we are in the process of assessing why it broke,” said Zenaida Kotala, the assistant vice president for strategic initiatives. the University of Central Florida, which manages the observatory. “We work with engineers to determine a repair strategy. Our goal is to make the facility as operational as possible. ”
Astronomers have been using the Arecibo radio telescope to study the cosmos since 1963. For most of its life, the observatory was by far the largest telescope of its kind in the world. (It has only recently been surpassed by China’s FAST radio telescope.) The 1,000-meter radio dish is built in a natural depression in the surrounding hills and acts as a giant ear that listens to fast radio signals from galaxies far away, far away.
“By being bigger, it’s just more sensitive,” says Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the non-profit SETI Institute, a leading research institute in the search for foreign intelligence. “Just as a larger optical telescope can see brave objects, so too can a larger radio telescope see things that are lighter.”
The Arecibo radio telescope has been used for a wide range of scientific experiments and was at the center of a number of firsts that have changed our understanding of the universe. In 1994, astronomers found a pulsar with Arecibo the first evidence of a planet orbiting another star. Arecibo also discovered the first millisecond pulsar, a type of rapidly rotating star used as an astrophysical clock in the hunt for gravitational waves, and the first repetitive Fast Radio Burst, a short pulse of high-energy radiation that scientists only begin to understand.
The history of the Arecibo telescope is also deeply intertwined with the history of SETI. The planetary astronomer Frank Drake, who conducted the first radio SETI search in the same year that construction began on Arecibo, served for years as director of the observatory. In 1976, he and Carl Sagan used the telescope to send the world’s first interstellar message to a galaxy 12,000 light-years away. It was a short image message that depicted humans, our DNA, and even the Arecibo dish itself. Since then, Arecibo’s SETI activities have mostly focused on listening to ET. (Although in 2009 artist Joe Davis effectively put his iPhone in the dish and used it to send a second inter-stellar message.)
“We were very saddened by the news about Arecibo,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center. “Arecibo is a unique asset in SETI and we look forward to returning to scientific operations.” For years, Siemion and his colleagues at Berkeley have been collecting radio data from Arecibo for SETI @ Home, a distributed computer project that could help anyone with an Internet connection search for intelligent aliens. Earlier this year, the SETI @ Home project stopped collecting new data from Arecibo and other radio telescopes, allowing its researchers to focus on analyzing the data already collected.
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