Arecibo Observatory

Arecibo Observatory

Arecibo Observatory, astronomical observatory located 16 km (10 miles) 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. This instrument, 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 has an auxiliary 12-metre (39-foot) radio telescope and a high-power laser transmitting facility used to study Earth’s atmosphere.

Arecibo Observatory after collapse

In August 2020 a cable holding up the central platform of the 305-metre telescope snapped and made a hole in the dish. After a second cable broke in November 2020, the National Science Foundation (NSF) 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. In October 2022 the NSF announced that it would not rebuild the telescope but would instead build an educational centre at the site.

Mercury's north pole

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. 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.