Squint a bit, and you will be able to see things that look like white circles along a horizontal axis in the center of this photo. They are not raindrops, but six of the twenty-seven enormous radio telescopes that make up the Very Large Array. Located on a remote plain off Highway 60 in central New Mexico, the VLA was built to be the world’s largest arrangement of radio telescopes, able to amass data from outer space dealing with black holes, newly forming planetary disks around young stars, supernovae, patterns of gas motion in the center of our galaxy, and more besides. Funded by future-thinking U.S. congress members in 1973, the Very Large Array was completed in 1980 for just $78.5 million. It has continued to add to human knowledge since then, and starting in 2017 began a new data collection of the earth’s skys that scientists estimate will be able to allow us to detect over ten million new objects: over four times our current knowledge.
