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No, this is not Roswell, and the aliens have not landed – yet. This is Pie Town, New Mexico. Well, almost. Located atop a vast and lonely plateau, oddly close to a one-horse town famed for, of all things, its pastries, stands the Very Large Array (VLA) National Radio Observatory. The VLA is often mistaken for a kind of telephone to dial up UFOs, but I assure you, if ET showed up here, he’d be out of luck. While New Mexico is famed as the State where an alien spacecraft is said to have crashed, been found, then summarily covered up by the US government in 1947, that is many miles east of these giant (think baseball diamond-sized here, folks), antennae.

Designed to ‘listen’ to space, the VLA took a total of 19 years to build at a cost of US $78,600,000.00. Since 1980, this collection of 27, 82-foot diameter parabolic antennae has been picking up images of thousands of objects beyond the Milky Way and manages to assist tens of thousands of scientists and astronomers as they attempt to map the universe.

How does it work?
Computers are used to connect the dishes, forming one massive radio telescope. The scope collects what it hears and stores it on magnetic tape for scientists to use. The entire operation is comprised of three arms of railway track that extend 13 miles from the center and include nine dishes mounted on each arm. Changing the distances between the antennae changes the resolution of what is being observed, much like a camera’s zoom lens.

The remote and undeveloped home of the VLA seems an odd place for some of the world’s most advanced scientific equipment. But the area is actually the perfect place for this strange display of dishes because it is untouched by electrical waves and other city disturbances, while its high altitude – about a mile above sea level – minimizes the blurring that happens when ogling objects at the edge of the universe.

Why Radio?
Optical scopes can only pick up three forms of light: ultraviolet, infrared and x-ray, but a radio can pick up waves beyond these frequencies, allowing observers to study nearly every type of object in the universe. If our eyes operated like theses dishes, we would see radio waves instead of light. The sky as we know it would appear completely different. The brightest objects we would see would be far distant galaxies experiencing violent outbursts and sending immense amounts of energy and matter into the cosmos. Our sun would be visible but the daytime sky would appear dark. Stars that now illuminate the evening sky would be gone, replaced by the light of high energy cosmic rays and clouds of flowing, interstellar gas. We would also see quasars if our eyes were VLA dishes. These unusual energy fluctuations stem from the centers of distant galaxies.

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