Arecibo
A dish in a sinkhole, listening for fifty-seven years
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Arecibo determined Mercury's rotation period, mapped asteroids that could strike Earth, and in 1974 produced the first discovery of a binary pulsar — which became one of the strongest indirect proofs of gravitational waves and won the Nobel Prize in 1993. The telescope collapsed in December 2020 after its support cables failed. It is also one of the few examples of major research infrastructure built in an American territory whose residents cannot vote in presidential elections.
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In a natural limestone sinkhole in Puerto Rico, a radio dish three hundred metres across was built. It could both listen for radio waves from space and send them out. In 1974 it transmitted a message towards a star cluster 25,000 light years away.
Sources
- Hulse & Taylor, Astrophysical Journal 195 (1975) — dobbeltpulsaren
- National Science Foundation: Arecibo Observatory
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