Thanks NYer!
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Posted on 07/06/2013 4:54:09 AM PDT by NYer
It’s a recurring theme in astronomy: observers see a blast of energy out in the cosmos, scratch their heads in confusion for a while, and finally uncover the existence of something entirely surprising and new. It happened with the quasars (now known to be gigantic burps from black holes swallowing hot gas), the pulsars (fast-spinning neutron stars sending out blips of radio noise hundreds of times every second), and even the Big Bang itself, first seen as a stream of microwaves slamming into Earth from all directions, nearly 14 billion years after the event itself.
Now it may be happening again. Back in 2007, astronomers detected a burst of radio noise, lasting maybe a second or so, the cause of which was totally unclear. There was reason to suspect it came from beyond the Milky Way, and must be extremely powerful to be visible at all. But it never repeated, and neither did a second, similar blast seen in 2011, making it very tough to puzzle out what was going on. Maybe both events were just some sort of rare fluke.
But a new paper in Science makes that seem very unlikely. Using the giant Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers have recorded four more of these mysterious bursts, and when the scientists extrapolated across the entire sky, they concluded that perhaps 10,000 of these blasts are popping off every day, all over the heavens. “It’s still a mystery what they are,” says lead author Dan Thornton, of the University of Manchester, in the U.K. “But at least it’s not a mystery that they exist.” In fact, Thornton and his co-authors claim that the observations reveal what he calls a “new cosmological population” of energy blasts, whose true nature is unknown.
(Excerpt) Read more at science.time.com ...
Mine is Black!
Thanks Shelly
I tried to write a short story once. The characters were an entomologist grad student with an interest in interstellar communication, her boy friend in far off Australia who ran the big telescope array, and a bee, the worker supervisor that delegated task in the colonial hive.
The gist was the grad student was so interested in her career and minding the apiary of her mentor she would not succumb to her own biology and go to Australia and true love. Meanwhile in the colony, growth necessitated action. A decision was being made to reproduce the colony and swarm. This action required tremendous communication between tens of thousands of individuals.
The irony was the forlorn grad student was so intent on communications from space she overlooked the active communication in process literally at her fingertips, among the bees on the frames she was removing and studying.
If we can not communicate or understand the communications of the earthbound colonies of bees, there is virtually no hope of understanding extraterrestrials.
6EQUJ5
Except they aren’t verbs, they are nouns. Hey - I didn’t major in English...
“...a stream of microwaves slamming into Earth...”
I’m neither a physicist nor an electromagnetic engineer but IIRC, the radiation of which he speaks is the 3 degree Kelvin attributed to the Big Bang.
While it is traveling at 300,000km/sec like everything else in the spectrum, I can’t picture radiation from 3K as having the energy to be called “slamming”.
Can anyone enlighten me?
It's a very subtle sort of slamming.
Your comment applies equally to the opposite theory.
Cosmic microwave radiation is wideband and very low level and nearly completely isotropic, coming in from all directions. This is a booming loud signal by comparison, at a wavelength 100X longer than the peak of cosmic microwave and coming in from a single direction.
Cosmic microwave radiation slams as well as any radiation source. The “temperature” refers to source temperature of an equivalent black body source. There is a theoretical model of what black body radiation looks like, and laboratory sources match it quite well. The Universe also matches the model, if the current temperature of the Universe is 2.7 K. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation
>>”No doubt that there are many other planets teeming with life out there, some more primitive by Earth standards, others way more advanced. Even the ones that are far more advanced will probably never develop the technologies to make contact with this little outpost called Earth.”<<
You are wrong (wink..) Aliens actually find “Planet Earth” to be an interesting place for interaction despite our relative obscurity in the universe.
Theme from “Flash Gordon”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNIVpMXHqlk
“Yet given the huge distances separating these platelets and the laws of physics, it is simply not possible for an alien biological or a mechanical entity to visit.” IF you limit your Physics to the point of declaring that we now have all the knowledge we will ever have regarding life, luminal speed, and dimensional reality, then your bold assertion is true. BUT I don’t believe you are in possession of all there is to know.
What I do not understand is this: 3K is by definition a very, very low energy state. Thus, how can we say that this low energy state “slams”?
Wisdom!
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