Bobby Dazzler

The world's biggest scientific instrument, and probably its biggest precision mechanism, is the giant radiotelescope at Jodrell Bank, just south of Manchester, England. Demonstrated to the press last week, it is almost finished and will go into action this summer, reaching into the depths of the universe for faint whispers of radio information.

The working part of the telescope is a parabolic reflector 250 ft. in diameter, surfaced with accurately curved steel plates and weighing 750 tons. Supported by two towers 185 ft. high, it pivots 360DEG on massive racks taken from turrets of dismantled battleships. The towers stand on twelve four-wheeled trucks that turn around a circle of railroad track. The combined motions of pivoting and turning allow the great reflector to point to any part of the sky.

Faint Whisper. The telescope is the baby of Dr. Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, professor of radio astronomy at the University of Manchester. It was designed by Henry Charles Husband, and its cost (more than $2,000,000) was paid by the Nuffield Foundation and Britain's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Leading British companies vied to make the telescope as nearly perfect as possible. They succeeded so well that its moving parts (total weight 2,000 tons) sweep the great bowl across the sky as smoothly and inevitably as if the earth were moving.

Radio astronomy had its beginnings in the U.S., but it has been brought to its highest point in Britain, whose frequently leaden skies handicap optical telescopes. It is still a young science, with surprises coming thick and fast. A vast assortment of radio waves filters down from the sky. Some of the waves come from nearby planets and the sun. Others come from patches of faintly luminous gas, or from the clouds of cold hydrogen drifting among the stars. The new telescope is fitted for recording all these faint whispers on wave lengths from ten centimeters to about 20 meters. Since its great area allows it to gather much more radio energy than small rivals, it will almost certainly hear strange whispers never heard before.

Colliding Galaxies. One of the most interesting problems for the telescope is the thousands of "radio stars": small patches of the sky that are sources of powerful Yadio waves but which seldom correspond with any object visible to optical telescopes. A clue to what these mysterious "stars" may be was given by the discovery about two years ago that the second strongest of them shows in the Palomar Mountain 200-inch optical telescope as a pair of galaxies, apparently in collision, hundreds of millions of light-years away. The new telescope men will attempt to show that fainter radio stars are also colliding galaxies. Since the radio waves created in some unknown way by such collisions penetrate much farther than light, they offer a means to investigate space much more deeply than optical telescopes can.

The telescope will be such a fabulously sensitive receiver that it can clearly hear man-made radio signals as they bounce back off the moon. Changes in the reflected waves will tell how many electrons exist in space between the moon and the earth. When the U.S. satellite starts its orbiting, the Jodrell Bank telescope will record signals bounced simultaneously off it and the moon. Picking up radio waves bounced off Venus will be something like 10 million times harder, but Director Lovell thinks it can be done.

There are other inviting problems, too: radio waves from the sun, from meteors, from thunderstorms on Jupiter. But British radio astronomers are even more excited about the unsuspected things that their great bowl will most certainly discover. "With this bobby dazzler of a thing," says Designer Husband, "we are only a stone's throw away from the Milky Way."

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