121–130 of 315 posts
Fuuuuuuuck. I understand the decision to dismantle the failing structure which is currently unsafe and tricky to repair. But might a new one be built in its place? How can we push for that?
Give your own money and/or find someone that will invest in the project.
This is horrible. Arecibo is still crucial in radio astronomy experiments ongoing as of 2019. It should be repaired, until a replacement is built.
As the article explains, it has been deemed to be unsafe to repair. What's probably missing in that sentence is "...within an acceptable budget."
Sad day. I worked in radio astronomy and stayed on site for a week a few years back. Amazing telescope, the scale of it has to be seen to be believed. They have had serious funding issues for some time now, so now that it needs repair, I figured they might retire it. Unfortunate for all the staff that work there, it employed quite a few people. RIP Arecibo.
When I was 5 years old, I saw a pbs documentary about the Arecibo telescope. During a shot of a huge expanse of the telescope's metal, the narrator said something to the effect of "as one gets closer to the equator the sun's rays are stronger and the metal becomes too hot to touch". This, combined with the fact that I had a globe with a raised ridge around the equator, caused me to assume (for many years) that the eq…
I wonder, if a simple CSS radial gradient was available, to easily create a realistic image of the Sun, might people (someone; anyone) use that instead of the usual yellow circles and assorted misleading colorfulness? Something like [2], but for its suboptimal choice of white point (so whiter in the center), and maybe the rim edge isn't quite right. Perhaps homeschoolers might pick it up if it was posted... somewhere?
[1] http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/SunDetermine... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16622/need-help-si...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quick and probably very inaccurate calculation Arecibo cost $9.3 million in 1963. This is equal to $79,000,000 now ( https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=93000... ). An F-35 costs about $100 million. Based on that, I'd be happy to give up a single F-35 to rebuild Arecibo.
And the US is planning to purchase 2500 of those. Because 2400 are clearly not enough.
The thing was iconic... even if not everyone watching/playing Goldeneye knew it was a real radio telescope, it was nevertheless one of those science megaprojects that featured prominently in the popular zeitgeist and got more than one young kid excited about what's out there in the stars. But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while…
My impressions is the neglect comes from having done all the useful things it could do ages ago, and not finding anything new to help with in the areas of science that gets funding.
The state of the art interferometry arrays are ASKAP and MeerKAT currently, in the sense of being the newest and being precusors of the SKA which is the biggest project right now.
In terms of best in class, it varies with the specific frequency and which bit of the sky you want to look at and also with what you consider an observatory: the Event Horizon Telescope that resolved the M87 black hole has the worlds best resolution at their mm wavelengths, but it's really a bunch of existing telescopes collaborating and not a purpose built facility.
Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?
Tbf China has one that's half a kilometer wide, so there's still hope for progress :) http://www.hexapolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Worlds-L...
That's too bad; glad I got a chance to visit a couple years ago. If anyone is wondering what's next: as others have noted, there's China's FAST antenna. That's a dish format telescope similar (but bigger) to Arecibo. The politics of this inevitably makes some scientists nervous. There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequen…
That's too bad; glad I got a chance to visit a couple years ago. If anyone is wondering what's next: as others have noted, there's China's FAST antenna. That's a dish format telescope similar (but bigger) to Arecibo. The politics of this inevitably makes some scientists nervous. There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequen…
In some sense I'm sure it did, but the USA is not a part of the SKA collaboration, so it's not a direct replacement.