REBEKAH ANDERSON: When I went to college, where cell phone service – obviously, they're used to it – an ice breaker was always like "What's your name and major, and what's an interesting fact about yourself" and I would always say "I live in a place with no cell phone service" and everybody was just shocked. But in Green Bank in particular, there is no cell phone reception at all – a fact that tour guide Rebekah Anderson jokes about: So, besides the mountains, the observatory also benefits from the National Radio Quiet Zone: a 13,000-square-mile national preserve for radio astronomy, which covers a part of West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland, and where cell phone towers are more regulated. That means that this seventeen-million pound metallic structure can rotate 360 degrees in only nine minutes, which means it can cover 85% of the sky, while most other radio telescopes are fixed and can’t cover as much sky surface.Īnd, as sensitive as it is, a simple cell phone could interfere with the signals it is trying to capture. That is the specificity of the GBT: it is the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. And if there are objects out there in the universe that emit radio waves, we can see those radio waves by pointing our dish in the right direction. The same thing happens with the radio telescope - the difference is that our mirror is not very shiny: it is white. So imagine that, if you're trying to look at stars through a telescope, you're going to point your telescope at a star that light from the star is going to hit the mirror in your telescope and bounce up into your eye. Sue Ann Heatherly, Senior Education Officer at the Green Bank Observatory, explains how it works: The GBT is aiming to catch faint radio waves from as far as fourteen million light years away. The reason this telescope needs to be out of sight, lodged in the middle of the Allegheny Mountains, is to provide a natural barrier against radio interferences from surrounding cities. And suddenly there it is, sitting in the valley: a 500-foot tall radio telescope – the Green Bank Telescope, or “GBT” for short. To reach this small West Virginia town of only 143 residents, you have to wind through mountain roads for about an hour. This facility owned by the National Science Foundation might be, well, under the radar, but it’s being used for some very forward-thinking projects you might not expect – including a search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Two hours by car west of Harrisonburg, the Green Bank Observatory is home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope.
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