This commentary is by Joanna Rankin and Mary Fillmore, both of Burlington. Rankin is an emerita professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Vermont, where she taught from 1980 to 2019. Her groundbreaking research on pulsars has been published in more than 150 scholarly articles. She is a founder of the Arecibo Science Advocacy Partnership, which “works toward establishing paths for the future of Arecibo and its groundbreaking science, education, and research.” Fillmore is a writer who has accompanied Rankin to Arecibo and elsewhere for many years.
It may seem like a long way from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to Vermont, and it is — especially in February. But the National Science Foundation’s recent plan not to rebuild the collapsed Arecibo radio telescope could have deep reverberations in the Green Mountain State, and Vermonters can help save it.
Many University of Vermont students had the privilege of doing actual observations with the telescope, the world’s largest at that time. Thanks to the National Science Foundation’s support for my research as a professor of astronomy and physics at UVM, these undergraduates were able to participate actively in real science, often publishing their results as co-authors.
The students sat beside me in the observatory’s control room overlooking the 19-acre dish, with almost a thousand tons of sensitive equipment suspended over it. With the help of expert Puerto Rican telescope operators, students used banks of computers to point the instruments to the exact spot where a particular star’s signals were received. Through the next hours, we talked about what we might find and why, and the intricacies of making the world’s largest ear to the heavens work perfectly.
Our task was far harder than pointing an optical telescope from the moon to a single grain in the Sahara: to pick up the flickering signals of pulsars many light years away. Why do those signals matter? Pulsars have revealed basic physical laws that govern our universe, including one Arecibo discovery that led to the Nobel Prize.
It was a joy to take students on the journey I began as a graduate student in 1969, so they could fully appreciate both the science the telescope was capable of, and the engineering marvel it represented.
We bounced along the rough road under the dish in a Jeep, so they could see almost 40,000 aluminum panels from below, each 3-by-6 feet and phared within a few millimeters to make a perfect spherical dish. In that world of ferns and tiny frogs, the students shivered when they looked through the perforated panels to see tons of instruments above them.
Then we roared up one of the hills that encircle the dish like scoops of ice cream, where they could see how high the three towers really were. One was taller than Big Ben, and each held up the cables from which the equipment was suspended over the dish.
In the evenings, we cooked dinner together and had long talks about everything on earth and beyond.
If Congress intervenes, the telescope can be resurrected as a cutting-edge instrument once more, using the immense knowledge we have acquired since the 1960s to guide the new design. Theories abound about why the cables that held up the instruments finally broke, and a new instrument could be designed to avoid almost all of those flaws. It would complement and exceed existing facilities worldwide — and renew the capacities that no other telescope can match today.
Among these are detailed studies of asteroids and their orbits; Arecibo data warns us about those which NASA considers “potentially dangerous.”
As important as the telescope was to Vermonters, it was even more important to Puerto Ricans. Some of the 30,000 local students who visit each year became scientists, engineers and telescope operators. For more than 60 years, Puerto Ricans have also staffed the telescope, painted it, repaired it, guarded it, cleaned its guest quarters and offices, cataloged its books.
With all the island has suffered in the last years — hurricanes, earthquakes, colonialism — the people have taken great pride in having a world-class observatory right there, where their kids could visit it.
Ironically, the National Science Foundation proposes to continue Arecibo’s education programs, but cut out its science mission. Local students can pull up in their buses, but what will they see? A graveyard? Or, once again, a world-class observatory that will take us into the future?
Everyone on the planet, regardless of nationality, shares the human desire to watch the stars. Our earliest ancestors eventually grasped the correlation between the stars and our weather, which was the beginning of agriculture.
Today, most of us look up and marvel from time to time — we thrill to the latest images and news from space. People have always understood that the vast sky is important.
Please contact Sen. Leahy, Sen. Sanders and Rep. Welch about resurrecting the Arecibo Observatory, and help them see that it’s about Vermont, every other state in the union, and every citizen of the world.
