Two very large circular structures, one pointing towards the sky and one into the ground look for the visible and invisible Red-Shift. They have two very different starting points but both are in the search for mankind’s place in the Universe.
The Arecibo Observatory on the island of Puerto Rico is the site of the world’s largest single-unit radio telescope, observes radio waves, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to the human eye. The other is James Turrell’s Roden Crater observatory.
After James Turrell bought the 400,000 year-old Roden Crater in 1979 , a 2 mile-wide volcanic crater on the edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona, he started to turn it into an observatory with several separate spaces, that will allow the visitor (probably in 2011) to follow celestial phenomena with their naked eye.
‘I also wanted to gather starlight that was from outside, light that’s not only from outside the planetary system which would be from the sun or reflected off of the moon or a planet, but also to emanate light from the galactic planes where you’ve got this older light that’s away from the light even of our galaxy. So that is light that would be at least three and a half billion years old. So you’re gathering light that’s older than our solar system. And it’s possible to gather that light, it takes a good bit of stars to do that, and a good look into older skies, away from the Milky Way. You can gather that light and physically have that in place so that it’s physically present to feel this old light. Now that’s a blended light, of course, but it’s also red-shifted, so it’s a different tone of light than we’re normally used to.’
In his hour-glass-like crater, Turrell is working with that tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, called light, which comes in many shades.
‘Certainly when people describe near death experiences, they use a vocabulary of light. And also when we have dreams, a lucid dream that’s in this color, that really is I think quite, quite astonishing. (..) We think of color as a thing that we’re receiving. And if you go into one of the sky spaces, you can see that it’s possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don’t change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision. This is very similar to simultaneous contrast, where you see a yellow dot on a blue field, versus the yellow dot on a red field. Same yellow dot will be seen as two different colors. … So there isn’t something out there that we perceive, we are actually creating this vision, and that we are responsible for it is something we’re rather unaware of.’
Built in 1963, the 1000-feet spherical reflector of the Arecibo Observatory performs red-shift surveys. The reflector consists of perforated aluminum panels, focusing incoming radio waves on to movable antenna structures 550-feet above the reflector’s surface.Currently a grand-scale sky survey managed by Cornell University is in search for yet-undiscovered pulsars or ultra-fast spinning neutron stars. Radio pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit a lighthouse-like beam of radio waves that sweeps past the Earth as frequently as 600 times per second.
Vasto Slipher was the first to discover galactic red-shifts around 1912. In the widely accepted cosmological model based on general relativity, redshift is mainly a result of the expansion of space: this means that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the more the space has expanded in the time since the light left that galaxy, so the more the wavelength of the light has been stretched, the more redshifted the light is, and the faster it appears to be moving away from us. The luminous point-like cores of quasars were the first “high-redshift” objects discovered before the improvement of telescopes allowed for the discovery of the Great Wall, a vast supercluster of galaxies over 500 million light-years wide which provides a dramatic example of a large-scale structure that redshift surveys can detect.
The largest observed redshift, corresponding to the greatest distance and furthest back in time, is that of the cosmic microwave background radiation; and it shows the state of the Universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and 379,000 years after the initial moments of the Big Bang.
‘I also want to say that the senses and gratification through the senses, while it can direct you toward the spiritual, is also something that will hold you from it fully. That’s the limits of art, and so I don’t think that art is terribly spiritual, but it’s something that can be along that way, be a gesture toward that,’ says Turrell about his art-work.
Meanwhile astronomers try to determine if the universe is expanding in an accelerated pace or if it is possible re-collapsing into a Big Crunch. I definitely want to visit both places!
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