Those restrictions began in the 1950s, when the Federal Communications Commission created the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile swath of sparsely populated countryside that straddles the borders of West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland. And so the people who live in these parts must, by law, forego some of the gadgets that most of us take for granted. Any device that generates electromagnetic radiation-a cell phone, a television, a wireless Internet router-can skew its data. For the same reason, it is also extremely susceptible to electronic interference. The GBT and other radio telescopes enable astronomers to detect and study objects in space that give off little visible light but emit naturally occurring radio waves-objects such as pulsars, gas clouds, and distant galaxies.īecause of its vast size and sophisticated design, the GBT is exquisitely sensitive to even the faintest radio pulses coming from space. Locals jokingly refer to it as the Great Big Thing. Towering nearly 500 feet above its wide, green valley, with a dish large enough to cradle a football field, the GBT is the world's biggest fully steerable radio telescope-and one of the largest movable objects anywhere on land. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, or GBT for short. On the contrary, it is the proud home of one of the marvels of the space age: the Robert C. Older residents roll down their car windows to greet each other and leave their front doors unlocked.īut Green Bank, population 143, isn't a technological backwater. Here, no cell phones chirp or jingle, and local kids aren't glued to the glowing screens of their mobile devices. GREEN BANK, West Virginia-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.
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