Very Large Array, NM

We just visited the Very Large Array Radio Telescope. It’s the array of radio dishes featured in the film Contact (which is the first movie Berck and I ever went to see together … awww). The visitor center had a little display about the making of the movie. They seemed very excited about it but were careful to point out that creative license had been taken … for instance, you don’t listen to radio telescopes with headphones, like Jodie Foster did.

There’s a little walking tour that visitors like us could take, right up to one of the dishes. The array is pretty amazing. Each dish is the size of a baseball diamond. There are 27 dishes, 9 on each arm of the array. When the astronomers want to see something really, really far away, they put the dishes out so that each arm is 13 miles long … that’s long enough so that if the VLA were centered in Washington, DC, each arm would extend beyond the Beltway. When the astronomers want to see something with greater resolution, they bring the dishes in close so that all of them are within .4 mile. 27 smaller radio telescopes spread out but working together can “see” as well as one huge dish. The VLA is the most powerful radio telescope on earth. But the VLA is part of an even larger array, the Very Large Baseline Array, with radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands.

The VLA is on a high plain (7000 ft) in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. The plain is surrounded by mountains to shield the radio telescopes from radio transmissions from cities, of which there are none close by. When the dishes are spread out at their furthest, they reach the edges of the mountains.

Berck and I wonder how many non-scientists have seen both the VLA and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the largest single dish on earth, like we have.