This week, I talk about the mystery of Astronomy and Fast Radio Bursts:
Michael Siegel
Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.
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What if the aliens are rubbing the magnetars together?
Nice show.Report
What does Earth look like at that distance? Nothing worth noticing?Report
From the distance of the orbit of Neptune, it’s a barely-discernable pale blue dot which inspires humility and awe. From a magnetar’s distance? We lack instruments to see planets directly.Report
It’s not seeing the planets but hearing their television shows, nuclear tests, and satellite phone calls that I’m wondering about.Report
I mean, say what you will about the distance of Neptune, but we can see the message that contained the picture of us from there.Report
It took Voyager about 21 hours to transmit each image from there, with a highly directional antenna and a great deal of forethought. None of our television shows or phone calls took the necessary effort to encode things so the signal could be extracted from the noise at interstellar distances. Noise includes things like thunderstorms, which release energy comparable to many kiloton nuclear explosion yields, all up and down the RF frequency spectrum.Report
So the next great leap in tech will get us to “we’re pretty sure that there is a non-zero number of planets out there that we can’t see but we’re pretty sure that they have lightning”?Report
Put me in the group that says even that will require gravitational lensing using the sun, where the focal point is at least outside Neptune, possible farther. I am old, and look at our response to climate change, and say, “No way humans manage that.”Report
Ah, crud.
Bummer.Report
I misremembered by an order of magnitude. The shortest focal length would put the observatory about 20 times as far from the sun as Neptune. There are other problems as well. Perhaps Michael could do a video about imaging Earth-sized exoplanets.Report
I’m certainly not Michael, but there is a section on telescope resolving power in Feynman volume 1. It’s basically a function of the diameter of the objective lens/mirror. I recall he first explains it in a classical sense, but then relates it to the uncertainty principle.
Anyway, making big mirrors is hard.Report
We’re getting better at it (see, eg, the European ELT scheduled for first light in 2027 with an aperture a bit under 40 meters). The planners are at least hoping the ELT will be able to observe direct light from some exoplanets.
And to be honest, Musk’s Starship could be a game changer in terms of what can be put into high orbit or the LaGrange points. (SLS less so in my opinion, at $2B or more per launch).Report
Well this video introduced me to magnetars. They seem pretty cool.
As a non-scientists who nevertheless knows a tiny amount about applied math, I have a question. In practice, how do astrophysicists figure out how “starquakes” work? Do they actually shove the predicted data into a huge computer model and crunch out the field equations? I’ve always assumed this, but few physics texts actually discuss this stuff. As a software person, I’m constantly wondering about the actual mechanics of science.
Anyway, it would be really cool if these fast radio bursts were actually produced by some super-smart alien kid’s home science kit.
“Look mom, I made a magnetar!”Report
It’s interstellar CB radio, putting out a 10-20.Report
I’m old enough to remember the CB radio craze, and now that song Convoy is running through my head.
Thanks 🙂Report
My Gen Z kids know the answer to “What’s your 20?” Parenting success!Report
I’m old enough to have had a CB in my car, because cell phones didn’t exist for kids yet.Report