Arecibo telescope: From prominence to ruin

Arecibo Observatory, astronomical observatory, is located 16 km south of the town of Arecibo in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico’s massive Arecibo telescope, famous for its stellar contributions to astronomy, collapsed on December, leaving the scientific community in shock and anguish. The collapse was devastating also for many Puerto Ricans, for whom the observatory was culturally significant. Let’s read in detail the role of the observatory in world astronomy

Arecibo Observatory, astronomical observatory, is located 16 km south of the town of Arecibo in Puerto Rico. It was the site of the world’s largest single-unit radio telescope until FAST in China began observations in 2016.

The second-largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, Arecibo had withstood many hurricanes and earthquakes since it was first built in 1963. Even before its collapse, experts had expressed alarm about the telescope’s condition and had recommended a controlled demolition of the entire structure.

Massive structure

Arecibo Observatory, built in the early 1960s, employed a 305-metre (1,000-foot) spherical reflector consisting of perforated aluminum panels that focused incoming radio waves on movable antenna structures positioned about 168 metres (550 feet) above the reflector surface.

The antenna structures could be moved in any direction, making it possible to track a celestial object in different regions of the sky. The observatory also had an auxiliary 30-metre (100-foot) telescope that served as a radio interferometer and a high-power transmitting facility used to study Earth’s atmosphere.

Cable snapped

In August 2020 a cable holding up the central platform snapped and made a hole in the dish. After a second cable broke in November 2020, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owned the observatory, announced that the telescope was in danger of collapse and the cables could not be safely repaired. The NSF thus planned to decommission the observatory. On December 1, 2020, days after the NSF’s announcement, the cables broke, and the central platform collapsed into the dish.

Platform for major discoveries

Scientists using the Arecibo Observatory discovered the first extrasolar planets around the pulsar B1257+12 in 1992. The observatory also produced detailed radar maps of the surface of Venus and Mercury and discovered that Mercury rotated every 59 days instead of 88 days and so did not always show the same face to the Sun.

A NASA historian confirmed that Arecibo’s lunar radar maps were used to determine a landing spot for the Apollo 11 mission, the first human landing on the moon.

American astronomers Russell Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., used Arecibo to discover the first binary pulsar. They showed that it was losing energy through gravitational radiation at the rate predicted by physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1993 for their discovery.

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