Science: Quiet Spot

The astronomer who wants to catch radio waves from space demands a quiet place for his radio telescope. In most locations, “random noise” from all kinds of electrical appliances interferes with or drowns out the ghostly spatial chirpings. Last week, after a one-year search, the National Science Foundation announced happily that it had awarded a contract to Associated Universities, Inc. for the construction of the nation’s largest radio telescope in what proves to be the quietest town in the eastern U.S.—little (pop. 100) Green Bank, W. Va., 50 miles northeast of White Sulphur Springs.

Preliminary plans for the Green Bank telescope were drawn up nearly three years ago. The new $2,000,000 telescope will have a 140-ft. paraboloid antenna (second in size only to the 250-ft. antenna being constructed in England) which should allow it to pick up spatial wave lengths never before recorded. Specifically, the astronomers hope that they will be able to “see through” the great drifting clouds of hydrogen, which have previously occupied their attention, to more interesting clouds of the deuterium atom (heavy hydrogen).

In their search for a new telescope site, researchers crisscrossed the East examining and rejecting 29 different locations. They were looking for a valley surrounded by mountains which would serve as a shield against local radio noise. They also wanted a location far enough south so that the telescope’s unsheltered antenna would not be exposed to wind, snow and ice. Green Bank filled the bill admirably. Radio noise in the valley was only a thousandth of the noise at the Naval Research Laboratory radio telescope in Washington. Moreover, Green Bank was distinguished by the fact that no commercial aircraft pass over or near it. Its quiet inhabitants occupied themselves raising livestock and dairying. All in all, the astronomers decided, there was no other place in the East where the sounds of the universe would come through quite so clearly.