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telescope

Arecibo is Down After an Accident. What If the Aliens Call?

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Arecibo Dish

The Arecibo Observatory — a gargantuan telescope in Puerto Rico famous for scouring the cosmos for asteroids and alien life — went quiet this week, following a devastating accident that left the telescope’s reflector dish in pieces. On Monday (Aug. 10) at approximately 2:45 a.m. local time, a metal cable at the facility snapped, slashing through the radar dish and tearing open a 100-foot-long (30 meters) hole, according to a statement from the University of Central Florida, which operates the National Science Foundation-owned facility. The snapped cable also smashed through several other cables and platforms that support the dish, causing … Read more

News: New Giant Telescope Aims to Answer the Question: Is There Anybody Out There?

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Lima telescope

On a remote hilltop 8,000 feet above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert, scientists hope to answer one of the most fundamental questions facing humankind: Is there life elsewhere in the universe? That’s one of various goals of the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, now in the early stages of construction and scheduled to start scanning outer space in 2021. Once it does, it’s expected to offer views of the farthest depths of the universe ever achieved. With seven curved mirrors giving it a record optical surface 80 feet in diameter, the GMT will have the sharpest images of any … Read more