The largest low-frequency radio telescope in the world is located 40 kilometers from the war front in Ukraine. Its technical name is UTR-2 and, for those unfamiliar with astronomy, its more than 2,000 antennas and diamond shape might seem like a giant art installation at the Venice Biennale. But UTR-2 was a project of the Soviet Union to decipher the formation of galaxies. Half a century after its opening, the Russian invasion left it disconnected from the stars.
Igor Bubnov was one of the astronomers at UTR-2 until Russian troops occupied it in the winter of 2022. In the following summer’s counteroffensive in Kharkiv province, the Ukrainian army liberated the radio telescope. However, the fighting had damaged its infrastructure. Its facilities are in the midst of war and too close to the enemy, Bubnov says, so putting them back into operation would be madness.
Bubnov could not return to UTR-2 and moved his work to URAN-2, another low-frequency radio telescope built by the USSR in the 1970s, this one in Poltava province, 100 kilometers from the Russian border. Bubnov and his colleagues at the National Institute of Radio Astronomy of Ukraine continue to operate from URAN-2 and two others in the provinces of Volhynia (in the west, near Poland) and Odessa, collecting data (it detects radio waves emitted by celestial bodies) that serve to decipher the mysteries of galaxies and the solar system. On February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, UTR-2 was aimed at Jupiter.
URAN-2 is located on the edge of a village made up of some old traditional Ukrainian-style farms. Its 512 antennas capture the electromagnetic radiation of celestial bodies, but also the concert that a group of geese dedicates to visitors. In the administration building of the radio telescope, on folding camp beds, the astronomers sleep. In one of the access beds they have beehives to produce honey and on the other side of the antenna field, a forest where they collect mushrooms.
The tranquility of the place is ideal for the operation of such sensitive technology, even if the war makes the work of science much more difficult. First of all, explains Rostislav Vaschishin, Bubnov’s astronomer colleague, there is the problem that the geolocation system is deactivated several times a day. It happens all over Ukraine: when the air raid warning is announced for the arrival of long-range Russian drones, the GPS stops working to make it difficult for the unmanned vehicle to continue its course towards its target.
This means, for example, that thousands of motorists in Ukrainian cities suddenly lose the signal that locates them on traffic maps or that Ukrainian radio telescopes fail to synchronize. Radio telescopes across Europe collaborate by pointing their antennas towards a certain point in the universe. Without the GPS signal, the URAN-2 cannot operate in a synchronized manner.
Other drawbacks of war for astronomers are periodic power outages and the fact that the radio spectrum is saturated with signals, both from drones and from radio-electronic weapons trying to disrupt the connection of unmanned vehicles.
“Despite everything, at least we shouldn’t be a direct target of the Russians, our antennas have no military use,” adds Bubsov, “although perhaps some observation drone pilot believes they are a new anti-aircraft weapon and attacks him.”
Youth flight
The worst thing, they say, is the massive flight of young people during the war. Millions of minors and tens of thousands of adult Ukrainians have left the country to pursue a career and perhaps dedicate themselves to science. Last August, President Volodymyr Zelensky allowed Ukrainian men aged 18 to 22 to cross the border to train abroad. The result was an exodus of people of this age, mainly to avoid military service.
“It is increasingly difficult for scientists to get out of our universities,” says Bubsov. This researcher reveals that the average monthly salary of the staff of the National Institute of Radio Astronomy of Ukraine barely reaches 150 euros: “The minimum wage in our country is 8,000 hryvnias (165 euros) per month, but the administration forces you to take sabbaticals to pay less.” Bubsov, 48 years old and in a responsible position, earns just over 300 euros a month. “How can there be people who want to become astronomers in Ukraine?” complains Vaschishin.
Vaschishin’s dream is to aim everything possible to study the 21-centimeter hydrogen line that marked the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang. “Since I won’t be able to live on my pension if I retire,” this 58-year-old scientist says wryly, “I will continue to work for the rest of my years.”
Vaschishin believes that people “look very little towards the sky”. He admits that it’s a strange feeling to study galaxies and be aware of how small humans are while they’re killing each other all around you. “After all, we are all atoms, each individual is a universe unto himself,” underlines his colleague Bubsov. “We are no different from the rest of the universe, everything is an infinite process of creation and destruction,” according to Vaschishin, “human society is killing itself in the same way that the sun will one day destroy our planet.”
Studying the stars in the midst of a war invites us to reflect on existence. But the issue is seen differently if you are a soldier in Kharkiv province, like a soldier guarding the UTR-2 perimeter on November 7: “The Big Bang is not the kind of explosion that interests me right now.”
