Spektr-R, come in

THIS isn’t what you would expect a “science city” to look like. They hunt for mysterious cosmic oddities like wormholes and white holes here, but as I step out of the car I see grey concrete-slab buildings that take me back to the drab days of my Soviet childhood.

The tiny science city of Pushchino, on the outskirts of Moscow, was founded in 1956 to house the Soviet Union’s first radio astronomy research facility. Back then, Soviet space science was riding high, with Sputnik about to start circling Earth and Yuri Gagarin’s space flight still a top-secret mission.

In the early 1980s, the Soviet government lined up Pushchino for one more scientific feat: to be the heart of the biggest radio telescope ever built. Project RadioAstron would sync up the signals from many telescopes to produce one highly detailed picture. A radio dish in orbit around Earth, dubbed Spektr-R, was supposed to be launched and linked up with radio antennas around the world, creating an uber-telescope whose “dish” had an effective span 30 times Earth’s diameter.

But just as the project neared completion, the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it most of the state funding for space science. “The country had other problems at the time,” recalls physicist Rustam Dagkesamanskii, director of the Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory.


Just as Project RadioAstron neared completion, the Soviet Union collapsed, along with state funding

Now, as 75-year-old Dagkesamanskii shows me around the city, this long-mothballed Soviet project is finally having its day in the sun. Spektr-R launched in July 2011, more than 30 years after the mission got under way – and it is now helping scientists get their sharpest look ever at black holes and other curious objects.

The telescopes on the ground appear decidedly old, but still do amazing science. The veteran of the place, RT-22 (pictured), was built in 1959. Despite its weathered looks, until recently it was the main receiver for signals from Spektr-R.

For several months now, Spektr-R has been zooming in on objects such as supermassive black holes, gravitational beasts millions of times more massive than the sun and thought to reside at the centre of every galaxy. RadioAstron is also peering ever closer to the event horizon of our galaxy’s black hole, the boundary at which nothing can escape the black hole’s gravity. The team hopes to study the material just outside the event horizon, says 81-year-old Nikolai Kardashev, the deputy director of the Russian Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Kardashev, another old-timer here, says RadioAstron’s first batch of data is the start of something that could potentially change our whole understanding of black holes. It might even show whether certain black-hole-like objects are actually something much more exotic: wormholes. These tunnels through space-time would have a unique signature, Kardashev says.

“Wormholes are thought to have their own structure, different from a black hole,” says Kardashev. “The core of a black hole is indeed black, and it’s the surrounding gas that emits radiation. But if it’s a wormhole, the radiation should be emitted from the wormhole itself.”

RadioAstron has already managed to get a clearer look at the event horizon of a supermassive black hole than any other ground telescope, measuring the temperature of the black hole at the core of quasar 3C273. “We got a higher temperature than we had before, but that’s not all,” says Kardashev. “We know there is a black hole inside, but the quasar also has some weird qualities. Ground observations have shown in the past that it has a strange magnetic field, so theoretical physicists have suggested that this is not just a black hole but a wormhole. We’d like to verify that.”

These are lofty goals, but RadioAstron also has more mundane quarry, such as newly forming stars and planets, and neutron stars – objects that cram the mass of the sun into an area smaller than Moscow.

They are also hunting hypothetical objects called white holes. These are time-reversed versions of black holes – whereas everything falls into a black hole, everything falls out of a white hole. If RadioAstron finds one, its existence could prove that time can flow in more than one direction. In this city pulled from another era, it’s easy to imagine that to be true.