Word: arecibo
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...first inkling that pulsars might not be reliable timepieces came after Cornell University astronomers at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, trained their 1,000-ft. radio telescope on a newly discovered pulsar in the Crab Nebula, the glowing remnant of a supernova-or stellar explosion-that was seen from earth in A.D. 1054. Unlike most other pulsars, which have relatively low repetition rates (between one and four per second), the new find was ticking about 30 times per second. Carefully measuring the pulse rate in October and then again in November, the astronomers found that it was slowing down by about...
While their map is the clearest view yet of Venus, the Caltech researchers are not the only radar astronomers mapping that planet. Similar surveying is being carried out by Cornell scientists using the 1,000-ft. dish telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and by MIT astronomers at two sites in Massachusetts. In March, Venus will again approach Earth. By boosting their radar signal to 450,000 watts, Caltech's electronic cartographers expect to make even more detailed maps...
Blue Star. Using the coordinates given by Hewish, Astronomer Frank Drake trained the giant Arecibo, Puerto Rico, radio telescope on pulsar 3 and discovered that each of its signals was composed of two closely spaced peaks. The peaks were so sharp, he said, that the signal may originate from an object as small as a few hundred miles across; if pulsar 3 were much larger, the peaks would be gradual and less distinct. Using England's Jodrell Bank radio telescope, Astronomer Graham Smith discovered that the radio waves from pulsars are polarized, indicating that they pass through a magnetic...
After remaining silent about the discovery for seven months, the Cambridge team published its findings and tentative conclusions in Nature, setting off a flurry of activity among U.S. scientists. Focusing Cornell University's giant radio telescope near Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on the one pulsar whose position was given by the British, Astronomer Frank Drake confirmed the rapid, regular signal and discovered that it was ten times as powerful at 111 MH (for megahertz: 1,000,000 cycles per second) than at any other frequency. "This has been the biggest bombshell that I can remember in radio astronomy," he says...
...Oftentimes this intelligent-civilization bit has been overdone," says Astronomer Schmidt, "but if you want to attribute anything to a civilization, then this is the best case we have had so far." The chance that pulsar signals do come from an intelligent race, agrees Arecibo's Drake, "does remain a possibility." At week's end, Cambridge astronomers reported in a second Nature article that a faint blue star had been tentatively identified as one of the pulsars, providing still another clue that may eventually help solve astronomy's latest and most exciting enigma...