How GoldenEye's Arecibo Observatory became a scientific and cultural icon

Tech Report

PC Gamer magazine

(Image credit: Future)

 This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 353 in February 2021, as part of our ‘Tech Report’ series. Every month we explore and explain the latest technological advances in computingfrom the wonderful to the truly weird—with help from the scientists, researchers, and engineers making it all happen.  

A disjointed, globe-spanning story this month, that takes in the island of Puerto Rico, the University of Milwaukee, spinning neutron stars at the edge of the galaxy, and your PC, via James Bond and a Battlefield 4 multiplayer map. 

Where to start? Well, in the late 1950s, nuclear missiles re-entering the atmosphere as part of a Soviet attack were considered to be a bit of a worry. The missiles dropped radar-reflective decoys behind them, and nobody knew enough about the upper levels of the atmosphere to tell the difference between these dummies and the real warheads coming in hot. One way to get this information, it was decided, was to build an enormous radio telescope—a huge dish 1,000ft across—reclined inside a sinkhole on Puerto Rico. 

Suspended above this dish would be a 190-ton platform carrying the receivers that would read the radio waves focused by the telescope. This platform also needed to be mobile, because moving the dish itself was going to be impossible. And so it was built, officially opened in 1963, a triumph of cold war engineering. When not looking for incoming nukes or bouncing signals off the Moon to find Soviet radar installations, the dish turned out to have other uses in the field of astronomy, and was soon showing results. It discovered that Mercury rotates once every 59 days instead of the previously believed 88, meaning it was not tidally locked to the Sun. It made the first radar observations of a comet, discovered the first extrasolar planets, and in 1968 provided the first evidence for the existence of neutron stars, by timing the periodicity of the Crab Pulsar. 

(Image credit: Future)

Pulsars, as you probably already know, are spinning neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their poles. Every time the star rotates, assuming it’s pointing in the right direction, the beam sweeps across the detector, producing a pulse rather like that of a lighthouse if lighthouses blinked at up to 700 times a second. The pulses were first observed on November 28, 1967, by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish in the faint constellation Vulpecula (found in the centre of the Summer Triangle asterism, sky fans). The signal was jokingly named ‘Little Green Men 1′, but further discoveries from other regions of the sky ruled out an alien civilisation. As the science became more precise, it was possible to detect minute differences in the pulses put out by a particular pulsar, and in this way the first planets orbiting a star other than the Sun were discovered.

Discovering these enigmatic celestial metronomes is the purpose of Einstein@home (einsteinathome.org), a distributed computing project centred on the University of Milwaukee that you can run on your home PC in the same vein as Folding@home, using exactly the same BOINC software. It takes data from the Arecibo telescope as well as the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite, and sends it out to be processed on its volunteer network. So far, it’s had success in discovering around 50 new radio pulsars and 25 previously unknown gamma-ray sources.

(Image credit: Future)

Tick tock

source: gamezpot.com