Artisode; Very Large Array

The naked eye can only see 2% of the universe. Here at the very large array, astronomers have been peering into the farthest reaches of space, making new discoveries on a continual quest for knowledge and understanding. The very large array is a radio telescope system that's composed of 27 individual antennas and each antenna is 230 tons in weight and is 82 feet across. These are addition antennas, they're much like what you have on the side of your house to get cable TV, except they're much bigger and much more sophisticated. All 27 of these addition antennas are made electronically to work together as a single instrument and it makes some of the finest images in radio astronomy. By having all those antennas working together, it can make a very high quality image in a pretty reasonably short period of time.

The VLA project was given the green light in 1972 and was inaugurated in 1980. Since then, astronomers have made many discoveries. One of the real strengths of the very large array has been its versatility. It literally has been able to provide forefront information about everything from our own solar system, the moon, the planet, the sun, and out to objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, stars being born, stars exploding as supernova explosions, large gas clouds where stars are being formed inside, looking at the region around the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Out to other galaxies, millions and then billions of light years away. They also discovered that the universe is expanding faster than they thought and that 70% of our universe is made up of dark energy. The analogy we use for the expansion of the universe is the raisin cake that you make. You have this lumpadot and you have a bunch of raisins in the lumpadot.

You bake it and as it expands, every raisin is getting farther apart from every other raisin. The whole universe, all of space, space-time is expanding. However, again, it was thought either the expansion is staying at the same rate or going to start slowing down, so they went out to measure this and instead they found the expansion is accelerating and then the question is, well, why? So there has to be something that is counteracting gravity and that something has a name, it's called dark energy, however, what it is is a mystery, we don't know. With so many questions to be answered and mysteries to be discovered, the VLA is now moving its own universe from analog to digital. We're replacing an old analog microwave waveguide system that brings the data back from the antennas to the control building with modern fiber optics, it brings digital data back. In fact, it brings 100 times more data back than the old system.

We're replacing the radio receivers that actually do the collecting of the signal with new receivers that are much more sensitive, recovering a wider range of frequencies than we covered before. And the result is that with the new equipment that will be finally installed in 2012, along with a brand new central computer called a correlator, we will have a very large array that is 10 times more powerful as a scientific instrument than the one we have today. What the expanded or upgraded very large array will provide is the ability to see objects that are fainter, the ability to see objects that are farther away and to much more impressively analyze the data that's coming from those objects, so the scientific output of the very large array in terms of new discoveries, new understanding will be multiplied by a factor of 10.

Astronomy really is a journey of discovery, and to those who pursue science as a career, the new stuff is really what's exciting. But we already know that's nice, we like to understand how things work, but what really gets people's juices flowing is what's out there left to discover? What do we not know that we can go out and figure out? And that's the excitement, and while I think astronomers currently in the field would like to think they are the ones who may discover all this, I suspect there may be some kid in school, taking the first physics course or taking the first algebra course, who might be the one who discovers some of this.