Richmond native Vince Gilligan, who produced Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, begins his newest series – Pluribus – in the New Mexico Desert, where astronomers have spotted a mysterious signal.
“And look – this gap here, this is where it stops and starts over It repeats? Every 78 seconds!”
Soon, more space nerds have assembled at the remote viewing site.
“It’s got to be something bouncing off the," says one astronomer.
"It’s not bouncing off the moon, Dave!" another responds.
"Maybe it’s those Chatty Cathies at the Forest Service. I hate those guys. They’re always on their radios, talking about trees.”
And by the end of the scene, the place is packed with excited scientists trying to crack the code coming from 600 light years away.
That sense of wonder and discovery may someday come from a mountaintop south of Charlottesville – home to UVA’s main observatory and a new telescope that recently arrived from Germany.
“A radio telescope is sensitive to the radio end of the electro-magnetic spectrum," says Brad Johnson, a professor of astronomy at UVA and the lead scientist on a project designed to learn more about sub-atomic particles collectively known as dark matter.
“It has this mysterious name because nobody knows what it is. All of the particles that we’re familiar with have been studied, and we have nice names for them, and there’s another ingredient which is similarly mysterious called dark energy. If we can figure out what they are, maybe we can use them as energy sources. Maybe they’re going to play some role in the story in the future, but the first step is to figure out what it is.”
Dark matter doesn’t emit or reflect light, making it invisible to the eye, but its gravity holds galaxies together – like cosmic glue, and the new radio telescope should allow Johnson and his colleagues to detect it.
But first a more mundane challenge -- they had to get the device from campus to the top of Fan Mountain, about 20 miles south of Charlottesville, along Route 29.
“It was 17 feet by 17 feet by nine feet – which is pretty big. One of the challenges with delivering a large crate like this with a helicopter is you have to find a flight path where there are no people underneath, and it’s hard when there are houses all over the place.”
So they put it on a truck and drove down to Fan Mountain, then used a kind of forklift to carry the telescope up three miles along a winding gravel road with steep drop-offs on one side, rocks and trees on the other. Johnson, researcher Mallory Helfenbein and grad student Dillon Bass walked alongside the precious cargo as it traveled about one mile an hour.
Now, a team is assembling the radio telescope – which cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Johnson says it’s part of his dream come true, a dream he first had in high school.
“I felt like the purpose of my life was to figure out how the universe works. I didn’t know you could do this for a living, and then I found out you could do it for a living, and then I decided that was what I was going to do.”
He hopes the new device will be ready to go this summer and expects visitors from around the world to check-in for an update on what is learned about dark matter.
