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NSF PR 97-49 - July 10, 1997
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Radio Telescopes in the New Movie "Contact"
Dish Up Real Science
In the new movie "Contact," astronomer Ellie Arroway,
played by actress Jodie Foster, searches for signs
of extraterrestrial life using massive, Earth-bound
radio telescopes.
Much of Contact's scientific intrigue, based on Carl
Sagan's 1985 bestseller, unfolds at two National Science
Foundation-supported radio astronomy facilities where
real-life astronomical mysteries continue to be probed.
Scientists use the government-supported telescopes
to detect radio waves not from distant civilizations
but from planets, stars, galaxies and other objects
in space. Radio observations extend astronomers' reach
into space and time, letting them "see" through gas
and dust in space to detect celestial objects whose
visible light cannot be seen from Earth.
In "Contact," Foster hears the first guttural, throbbing
message transmitted by other-worldly life using the
world's most powerful radio telescope, the Very Large
Array in Socorro, New Mexico, a collection of 27 antennas
spread in a three-armed configuration across the desert.
The huge dishes which Foster manipulates in the film
from her lap-top computer like a high-tech, movable
Stonehenge are run in reality by NSF's National Radio
Astronomy Observatory. Electronically linked to simulate
a single radio telescope up to 20 miles in diameter,
the antennas can be bunched together or moved apart
along railroad tracks into different configurations.
About 700 astronomers visit the VLA each year to observe
the universe.
Earlier this year the VLA was used to detect the first
radio emission from a gamma-ray burster shedding light
on the cause and locations of these explosions, one
of the great mysteries of astrophysics. In a 1994
discovery, the VLA revealed an object within the Milky
Way Galaxy--a double-star system with a black hole
or neutron star as one partner--ejecting jets of particles
at nearly the speed of light, a process thought to
mirror the dynamics at work in the centers of galaxies.
In "Contact," Foster gets her scientific start at
another NSF-supported facility, the Arecibo Observatory,
a huge, stationary radio dish operated by Cornell
University in the lush mountain setting of Puerto
Rico. The 1000-foot reflector dish, also featured
in the James Bond film, "Goldeneye," is the largest
stationary radio telescope and most powerful radar
in the world. Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor of Princeton
University earned a Nobel Prize by using the dish
in the 1970s to discover the first pulsar in a binary
system, confirming a prediction of Einstein's theory
of general relativity.
In the early 1990s, Arecibo was used to detect the
first planets outside the solar system. The dish recently
received a facelift in a $27-million upgrade which
makes it four times more sensitive to radio emissions
from distant galaxies. The dish was used in the 1960s
to chart accurately for the first time the rate at
which the planet Mercury rotates. More recently it
studied ice in Mercury's polar craters, the chemistry
of Earth's upper atmosphere and rotating pulsars.
The new upgrade will let astronomers "hear" signals
from much greater distances, and further back in time,
than before.
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