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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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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…
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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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ABC News10: Town full of people lives without cellphones, Wi-Fi to get signals from space
No cell phones, no Wi-Fi… not even a radio station. And that’s just how one town in West Virginia wants it. The town of Green Bank doesn’t use personal technology because it’s listening to something else. It’s in the middle of the national radio quiet zone, home to the World’s largest movable radio telescope. The…
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Discovery News: Why Does This U.S. Town Ban WiFi And Cell Phones?
Imagine living where Wi-Fi and cell-phones are banned. This [West] Virginian town, is a gem for space science and safe haven for many. Aired on Discovery News. View the video here.
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Pasadena News Now: Local High School Students Hunt for Pulsars
Hanaa is hunting for a blip in a vast set of data. Although she is only a high school student, she is searching for the signal of a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation like a lighthouse. Hanaa and 19 of her fellow students at Alverno Heights…
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Clandestine Black Hole May Represent New Population
06/29/2016: Astronomers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) [and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope] to find out that there is a peculiar source of radio waves originally thought to be a distant galaxy. As it turns…
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06/29/2016: Seeking Radio Silence in West Virginia’s Quiet Zone
The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is a sleepy Appalachian town, the kind one might move to in order to escape the grind of urban centers and bustling suburbs. But its 143 residents didn’t exactly move there for literal quiet. Green Bank is located in eastern West Virginia, in what’s known as the National Radio Quiet Zone,…