To Discover the Universe

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I saw only one major sight today.

It’s deliberately located in the middle of nowhere in southwest New Mexico.

For anyone thinking of visiting, this site needs to be worth planning a day around, because it requires nearly seventy five miles round trip from anywhere else.

I’m enough of a science enthusiast that it was definitely worth it.

I went to the Very Large Array.

Camino Real

The day opened with pretty much the reverse of five days ago, a drive down a long slope with big mountains in the background.

The slope marks the southern end of the Rocky Mountains.

I then passed through the traffic of Albuquerque, with a great view of the Sandia Mountains on the left.

After that, the landscape became flat and empty.

The only sign of life is a long row of cottonwood trees, the Rio Grande River.





This next stretch of highway resembled the plains of Wyoming (see The Sacred Tower) with even less grass, flat and profoundly empty.

Occasional views of mountains to the far west are the only things to break up the monotony.

This highway follows the route of the Camino Real, an extremely historic route that linked Santa Fe with El Paso under Spanish rule, but I’d never know it while on it.





My stop for lunch really brought home the solitude out here.

I pulled off the road at an intersection where the only sign of humanity is a truck stop.

Unlike the highway palaces seen elsewhere (see Journeys into Boredom), this one had old gas pumps next to a weather beaten building made of cinder blocks.

It looked like a film set.

The food was descent diner fare.



I finally pulled off the interstate for good at Socorro.

It looks like a typical town for the rural west, a small business district surrounded by uncountable fast food joints and other sprawl.

I turned west here.

Soon afterward, I saw the sign: “To VLA, 37 miles. WARNING: NO SERVICES”.





For a little while, the scenery improved.

The roadway entered a ravine between short hills, and then a proper valley.

The hills and mountains in the distance have no trees.

The highway eventually passed a cluster of buildings, the only structures since Socorro.

These had another warning about the distance ahead.

Very Large Array

Soon afterward, the hills faded away to reveal a wide desert plain surrounded by ridges of hills, the Plain of San Agustin.

It’s utterly empty except for some desert scrub.

I might as well have been back on the road to Gerlach (see The Lonely Road to Paradise).

I finally crested a rise and saw something surreal and isolated in this desert, a group of large radio dishes.

They are all white and arranged in three long rows.

For some reason, the Very Large Array looked both smaller and less interesting than I expected.

Even so, I needed a long time from that first view to finally reach the place.





Casual visitors have access to only one building, which contains a museum.

The Very Large Array was built in the early 1970s to probe the deepest objects in the cosmos.

Celestial bodies give off lots of radiation with all sorts of different frequencies.

Visible light from stars, what I’ve been seeing on many nights, (see This Hard Land) is only a small portion of what reaches earth.

The VLA receives the lowest frequency radiation, radio waves.





The low frequency makes radio waves hard to detect.

Normally, a very large dish is required to receive them with the sensitivity needed to observe anything significant.

In the late 1960s David Heeschen had the idea that a large series of dishes could get around this problem.

Every dish would get a slightly different reading of the same radiation, so combining the data by computer would produce an image of the source.

The VLA does this quite successfully.

The museum has images of what the facility has found: evidence of black holes, huge jets of gas from stars, and some of the furthest galaxies known.

Radio waves pass through dust clouds, so the VLA is also one of the few facilities that can study the center of our galaxy, finding things like newly created stars.





Why is it out here?

Earth sources generate plenty of radio waves themselves, which can interfere with the observations.

Radio stations are obvious, but cell phone towers, high voltage wires, and police/fire radios also all generate interference.

The wide flat plain out here means those sources are far away, and the mountains also block much of it.

The other reason, of course, is that the New Mexico government offered the organizers some grants.





The museum also discusses the next generation of radio astronomy.

The same techniques pioneered here can now be used to combine data from observatories around the world.

Technicians are currently setting up a network to do just that, the largest sensing system in history.

They call it the Very Long Baseline Array.





A single panel at the museum covers the reason my initial impression of the VLA was smaller and duller than expected.

The observatory found fame through the movie Contact.

It tells the story of a radio astronomer who looks for and possibly finds extraterrestrial life, causing a worldwide sensation in the process.

The filmmakers expanded the size of the observatory through computer graphics, and also used background shots to move the location to somewhere more scenic (although unspecified in the film, the footage was shot at Canyon de Chelly, see Historic Canyon).

They filmed at the actual VLA for a week, during which actual observations continued uninterrupted.

Extraordinarily for this desert, rain fell throughout filming.





A short trail behind the museum goes to one of the dishes.

It looks like a supersized satellite dish on a railroad track.

The optimal dish arrangement depends on the type of phenomena being observed.

A super heavy duty tractor moves them when necessary.

Each dish has a warning that it can rotate at any time; since the earth rotates continuously, the dishes must rotate to compensate.

Observations continue twenty four hours a day.





After the VLA, I had a long lonely drive back to Socorro.

Night fell during the drive.

It’s happening noticeably earlier and earlier, which is affecting my desire to keep travelling.

After getting food and gas, I crossed the Rio Grande into southeast New Mexico.

This, too, was a long empty road finally ending in a small town.

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Photos

VLA
The Very Large Array in southwest New Mexico

Camino Real
The lonely trail that once lead to Santa Fe

New Mexico Mountains
Mountains west of the Rio Grande on the way to the VLA

VLA first view
My first view of the VLA, much smaller and duller than the movie version

VLA dish
Close view of a single VLA dish

VLA
One last shot of the complex