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Tag: Radio telescopes

  • Ukraine Destroys Legendary Soviet-Era Telescope Once Used to Phone Aliens

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    Ukrainian defense forces destroyed a giant radio telescope in Crimea, a powerful planetary transmitter once used to support deep space missions and METI—the attempt to message extraterrestrial civilizations.

    Ukraine destroyed Yevpatoria RT-70 in a drone attack to prevent Russia from using it for military communication purposes, Space.com reported. Russian defense forces reportedly carried out recent upgrades to the telescope to support attacks on Ukrainian territory, but the 230-foot (70-meter) antenna dish was built by the Soviet Union to study Venus and Mars and communicate with deep space probes.

    Phone home

    The RT-70 was one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. Built in the 1970s, the telescope was capable of delivering and receiving signals for space experiments, including those conducted by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Evidence).

    The Yevpatoria radio dish. © By S. Korotkiy – S. Korotkiy, CC BY-SA 3.0.

    The telescope was used to send several extraterrestrial messages. Between 1999 and 2003, the RT-70 was used to send two sets of interstellar messages to nearby stars as part of the Cosmic Call experiment. In 2001, a group of Russian teenagers used the telescope to send the Teen Age Message signal, a series of interstellar radio transmissions directed toward six Sun-like stars. In 2008, RT-70 was used to transmit a high-powered message to Gliese 581c, a super-Earth exoplanet. The message, aptly titled “A Message from Earth,” contained 501 images, text, and songs selected by the public through a competition.

    Aside from attempting to contact extraterrestrial intelligence, RT-70 was also used to support several Soviet-era space missions like Venera, Vega, and Phobos to explore Venus and Mars. It was also used as part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and Rosetta missions.

    The radio telescope has been under Russian control since its annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Russia reportedly used the telescope to improve the accuracy of its GLONASS satellite navigation system, which is similar to GPS, according to Space.com.

    The annexed Crimean peninsula is home to key observational facilities, including the Shajn Mirror Telescope, the largest optical instrument in Ukraine, and the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory.

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, resulted in major loss for Ukrainian research facilities, according to a recent report in Nature Astronomy. Astronomical observatories have sustained heavy damage, and much equipment has been destroyed, the report stated. A 2024 UNESCO report estimated that $1.26 billion is needed to restore public research infrastructure in Ukraine.

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    Passant Rabie

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  • Most Powerful Fast Radio Burst Ever Detected Hits Telescopes Across North America

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    For almost two decades, astronomers have detected extremely powerful, millisecond-long flashes of radio waves known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) from beyond our galaxy—and had no clue where they came from. Now, a team of scientists has detected the brightest-ever FRB and finally pinpointed its origin to a nearby galaxy.

    Researchers have long suspected that FRBs are the result of highly energetic and violent events, like clashes between neutron stars. But even though they can generate more energy in a burst than our Sun emits in a year, they’re gone in less time than it takes to blink. Due to their transient nature, astronomers have been unable to locate exactly where they originated until now.

    “We were detecting lots of FRBs, but only had crude information on where they were occurring in the sky,” Bryan Gaensler, a co-author of the study and dean of the UC Santa Cruz Science Division, said in a statement. “It was like talking to someone on the phone and not knowing what city or state they were calling from.”

    To which he added: “Now we know not only their exact address, but which room of their house they’re standing in while they’re on the call.”

    The burst’s brightness and its proximity are giving researchers new clues as to not just where the flash originated but also what caused it. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    The GOAT of fast radio bursts

    Astronomers detected this exceptionally bright FRB, formally referred to as FRB 20250316A, in March from the direction of the Big Dipper using the CHIME radio telescope in British Columbia. They’re referring to the flash as “RBFLOAT” for “Radio Brightest Flash Of All Time.” The flash produced more energy in a few milliseconds than our Sun produces in four days.

    The astronomers pinpointed the flash thanks to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a large radio telescope in B.C., and its newly completed “outrigger” telescope array, which spans across North America from B.C. to West Virginia. This vast network, which went live a few months ago, is sensitive enough to detect ultrafast, bright radio flashes.

    While many FRBs repeat, pulsing multiple times across several months, RBFLOAT emitted all its energy in just one burst. In hundreds of hours after it was first observed, astronomers did not detect another burst from the source.

    Astronomers traced the burst to a region just 45 light-years across—smaller than the average star cluster—in the outskirts of a galaxy about 130 million light-years away. RBFLOAT occurred along a spiral arm of that galaxy, which is dotted with many star-forming regions. The burst originated near, but not inside, one of these regions, according to the study.

    “It is remarkable that only a couple of months after the full Outrigger array went online, we discovered an extremely bright FRB in a galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood,” Wen-fai Fong, a senior author on the study and professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, said in a statement.

    Solving the cosmic mystery

    Then, using data from the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, a spectrographic instrument on the 10-meter Keck II Telescope in Hawai’i, the researchers were able to study RBFLOAT’s surroundings. This included the physical properties of the gaseous environment the FRB originated from, including the rate of star production in the galaxy, the total amount of gas present at any location in the galaxy, and its density.

    But it’s still a mystery what exactly caused the flash. The team suspects that it was produced by a magnetar—a highly magnetized neutron star left behind after a supernova.

    “Spiral arms are typically sites of ongoing star formation, which supports the idea that it came from a magnetar. Using our extremely sensitive MMT image, we were able to zoom in further and found that the FRB is actually outside the nearest star-forming clump. This location is intriguing because we would expect it to be located within the clump, where star formation is happening,” Northwestern graduate student Yuxin “Vic” Dong and study coauthor said in a statement.

    “This could suggest that the progenitor magnetar was kicked from its birth site or that it was born right at the FRB site and away from the clump’s center,” Dong added.

    With the CHIME Outriggers now fully running, astronomers expect to pinpoint more FRBs each year, perhaps bringing us closer to understanding their origins.

    “This result marks a turning point,” study author Amanda Cook, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, said in a statement. “Instead of just detecting these mysterious flashes, we can now see exactly where they are coming from. It opens the door for discovering whether they are caused by dying stars, exotic magnetic objects or something we haven’t even thought of yet.”

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    Natalia Mesa

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  • Jaw-Dropping Report Reveals Causes of Arecibo Telescope Collapse

    Jaw-Dropping Report Reveals Causes of Arecibo Telescope Collapse

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    The famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed due to a combination of decayed zinc in the telescope’s cable sockets and previous damage from Hurricane Maria, according to a report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

    The massive radio telescope’s collapse in December 2020 marked the end of a prolific source of radio astronomy data. According to the recent report, the root cause of the telescope’s collapse was “unprecedented and accelerated long-term zinc creep induced failure.” That failure occurred in the telescope’s cable sockets—crucial bits of infrastructure for supporting the telescope’s 900-ton platform, which hung above the radio dish.

    The cables began to fail before the collapse. The NSF decided to demolish the dish before it fell, but the weakened infrastructure beat them to the punch. The Academies’ Committee on Analysis of Causes of Failure and Collapse of the 305-Meter Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory published the aptly titled report. The committee analyzed data and investigations collected and performed by the University of Central Florida and the National Science Foundation (NSF). You can read the report online here.

    The telescope’s collapse in 2020 was dramatic as it was swift. The cables suspending the telescope’s platform above the its 1,000-foot (304.8-meter) dish snapped, causing the platform to plummet down through the radio dish. The catastrophic collapse took less than 10 seconds, thus ending the venerated observatory’s 57 years of operation in northern Puerto Rico. The Arecibo Observatory discovered new exoplanets, created maps of other worlds, observed fast radio bursts, and aided in humankind’s search for life beyond Earth.

    “The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming.”

    However, the report found the collapse began well before the fateful day in December 2020. The committee concluded that the “failure sequence” took 39 months and began with the effects of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. Inspections following the storm found evidence of cable slippage, according to the report, but wasn’t investigated further or addressed by anyone. “The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming,” the committee wrote.

    But that’s not all. As the committee noted, “in over a century of successful use prior to the Arecibo Telescope’s collapse, all the forensic investigations agreed that such a spelter socket failure had never been reported.” The report went on: “The only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer … is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope’s uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment.” In other words, the sockets’ role in suspending such a powerful radio transmitter somehow contributed to the 2020 catastrophe.

    In October 2022, the National Science Foundation announced that the site would be remade into a STEM-focused education center, with a slated opening of 2023. But in June 2023, the observatory officially scaled back the succession plans. In September 2023, NSF announced their institutional partners to manage the transition of the observatory site into an education center. The site may never again collect radio data, but it will—in some form—continue its legacy as an epicenter of astronomical discovery.

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    Isaac Schultz

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