The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island, will not be repaired. Arecibo is the end scene of the film GoldenEye – even if it’s not the best James Bond: this is where the fight between Pierce Brosnan and the big bad takes place, who ends up crashing into the bottom of the gigantic dome.
franceinfo: What does this radio telescope look like?
Herve Poirier: Because Arecibo is first and foremost a spectacular monument: a spherical antenna 300 meters in diameter and 50 meters deep, with lots of cables strung above, all lost in the middle of the tropical jungle.
Arecibo is also the movie Contact: Jodie Foster is working in this radio telescope when she receives a message sent by extraterrestrials. Because Arecibo is closely associated with ET It is from there that a famous message was sent in 1974 in the cosmos, intended for a possible intelligence able to hear it. And this is where the data for the SETI program was collected, with the aim of detecting the presence of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
What did it allow us to discover?
So, of course, he did not find traces of ET But, since its construction in the early 60s, he has made some very good discoveries. He observes the cosmos in radio waves, not in the visible, which allows him to probe the energetic universe, to observe violent, massive phenomena. He thus provided the first proof of the existence of neutron stars, the first indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves. He was a pioneer in the detection of asteroids, in the observation of exoplanets…
But today, it is too old, too damaged?
It suffered an earthquake in 2014, a hurricane in 2017, a storm in 2020. Nobody was therefore surprised when the American National Science Foundation which manages this instrument announced that it will not repair this damage: the radio telescope will become an educational center. It must be said that it was a little overwhelmed.
In 2016, the Chinese FAST telescope with its 500-meter dish became the largest radio telescope in the world. Above all, it was overtaken by the development of interferometry: the combination of several radio telescopes all over the world now makes it possible to considerably increase precision. This is how we can now observe the central black hole of our galaxy.
In short: the closure of Arecibo is not a great loss for science. But he had a good life. And we must pay tribute to this monument: it marked our imaginations.