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01/11/2016: Tabby’s mystery – Something 20 times Jupiter’s size may be orbiting a nearby star
The graph made astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian sit up at her desk at Yale University. Something was definitely strange — the line was mostly flat but had two sharp dips resembling stalactites hanging from the ceiling of a cave. The dips implied that light coming from the star KIC 8462852, more than 1,400 light years away,…
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01/06/2016: How residents of a tiny West Virginia community live without any kind of modern technology
In West Virginia, just 200 miles away from Washington, DC, you’ll find a community of roughly 8,000 people who live completely off the grid. In the 13,000-square-mile “National Radio Quiet Zone,” all cell phone, Wi-Fi, microwaves, and even some vacuum use are all banned by law. The restrictions were put in place because of the 11…
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01/04/2016: Watch this space: Telescope releases mass of data
Astronomers in China working with one of world’s largest optical telescopes released a huge collection of data over the new year holiday, increasing the chances of “significant findings” in space exploration, experts say. The latest update to the National Astronomical Observatories’ sky survey, conducted using the LAMOST telescope, includes some 4.62 million spectral data relating…
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The Atlantic: The Town Where High Tech Meets a 1950s Lifestyle
Life in Green Bank, West Virginia, is far from ordinary. The small town sits inside a “national radio quiet zone” that houses one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. To ensure that astronomers work without interference, residents cannot use any product that transmits wireless signals within a ten-mile radius of the telescope. In…
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National Geographic: Life in the Quiet Zone
The barrage of noise and distractions that are all but inescapable in most American communities is refreshingly absent in this unassuming hamlet, located in the wooded hills of Pocahontas County, four hours west of Washington, D.C. Here, no cell phones chirp or jingle, and local kids aren’t glued to the glowing screens of their mobile…
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NPR: Enter the Quiet Zone
There are no physical signs you’ve entered the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area that covers the eastern half of West Virginia. But the silence gives you a signal. Somewhere around the Virginia-West Virginia state line, the periodic buzzes and pings of our smartphones stopped. “Zero [service]. Searching,” said photographer John Poole, who traveled…
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Vice: Save The Last Great Telescope
The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope and the world’s largest land-based movable structure. It is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) site at Green Bank, West Virginia, USA. NRAO is located in the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 mile zone where all radio transmissions are…