There was a time when phones crossed. Someone dialed a number, and all of a sudden, the receiver didn’t appear online, but a third party that no one knows how they got on the call. Luck (or bad luck) in this sense was unmanageable: a person could appear on the other side or not. Almost half a century after the adventures of rotary phones, this is a practice used by space staring scientists.
Speakers are trying to capture any sound or light from the universe to better understand us, as well as trying to establish communication with other galaxies. From NASA and hundreds of other research centers that include places as far away as the Atacama Desert in Chile, or the Royal Astronomical Society in London, news is piling up and something unexpected is starting to emerge: The sound of galaxies.
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Zgharta is a city in northern Lebanon that is believed to be part of the Neolithic Revolution, the first major shift in human life from nomadism to a sedentary life. There Elias Kammoun was born, who spent most of his childhood examining the sky. He recounts: “I studied physics and then astrophysics in Beirut.” My fascination with black holes and active galactic nuclei.” His career continued with postgraduate and PhD degrees, and today he is an astronomer with the Royal Astronomical Society, leading a team focused on investigating quasars, a galaxy that houses a supermassive black hole with more than a million Solar mass at its center – attracts nearby matter.
(We recommend: scientists “listen” to the symphony of gravitational waves in the universe.)
In their latest discovery, the team has identified a galaxy that has emitted the brightest beam of light ever recorded: 100 trillion times more intense than the Sun. J1144, as the quasar is called, is located in a galaxy 9.6 billion light-years away. “Despite its distance, it is closer to us than other sources with the same light load, which allows us to collect data about the black hole that feeds it and its habitat,” he explains.
For their investigation they used information provided by four observatories to calculate the heat of the rays. “We discovered that the temperature is 350 million Kelvin (an absolute thermometer that does not have negative values), more than 60,000 times that recorded on the surface of the Sun. We confirm that in the black hole at the center of the quasar, the mass is about 10,000 million times that of the Sun, and it grows within 100 solar masses per year thanks to the stars it swallows.The curious thing about this process is that, for the first time, they heard the universe “burn”. Great discoveries, scientists should be open to surprises.”
Mars attacks
NASA launched Perseverance in July 2020. His goal was to travel the planet’s surface for at least one Martian year, which is about 687 Earth days.. The big change of interest was when the expedition became aware of the sounds of the experiment. It incorporated a pair of microphones which provided unique audio recordings. In addition to shedding those emitted by the ship and its instruments, such as his robot’s explorations, the primary value was listening for planetary life on the red star.
Baptiste Ched was born in France, in Le Mans. His passion has always been space exploration. He studied and became a scientist at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace, which was responsible for developing microphones carried by the Perseverance rover to try to listen to Mars, with the official praising: “We discover valuable information that we did not know: for example, this sound travels much more slowly on Mars than here. And she suffers from erratic behavior that we haven’t fully exposed yet.”
NASA reports that the slower sound waves are due to different conditions, such as the density of the atmosphere they travel through, which is 100 times thinner than our Red Planet’s. The speed of sound waves here is 343 m/s; and on Mars, 250 m/s. High-pitched sounds dissipate faster than low-pitched sounds. If two people more than five meters apart tried to talk on Mars, they would have trouble hearing each other. We are investigating the turbulence represented by the atmosphere. The disturbance will help understand how the environment reacts.”
While studying the recordings of Perseverance, another team has just entered what they call the Times Square space arena.Seek to attract some voices from the universe. This project is led by Akshay Suresh, who was born in Madras (India), raised in Bombay and works on a team led by James M. Cordes, at Cornell University in the US, dedicated to researching extraterrestrial intelligence and data processing technologies. signals in neighboring galaxies.
“Most of space is a vast, empty space peppered with signals of many frequencies due to astrophysical phenomena near planets, stars, and their remnants,” Suresh explains. These signals are outside the range of frequencies audible to humans. However, it isNASA led “sonication” projects to artificially map inaudible frequencies in the range humans can hear. In this way, we can make astrophysical phenomena heard.”
Achieving the breakthrough in listening for periodic spectral signals is the department led by Suresh, and he’s leading the way in detecting systemic emissions from the Milky Way. It focuses on tracking and recording repeating patterns in near space, for which they developed software called BLIPSS.. Its architecture relies on artificial intelligence to make it more sensitive to periodic sequences of pulses, which are the fastest to traverse the dairy district.
(It may interest you: They have detected for the first time neutrino emission from within the Milky Way)
Quoting Einstein’s special theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Radio waves carry the lowest energy of all wavelengths of light.. Comparing the different options, radio transmissions will provide the cheapest form in terms of power of fast interstellar communications between space worlds,” he adds. (an object used to identify a potential location or danger) continuously. Therefore, by using pulsed signals, the transmitting end can save energy by reducing the time the transmitting antenna has to operate.”
AI has been invaluable in helping astronomers distinguish real signals from background noise and interference with little or no human intervention.. A recent example is a study led by Peter Ma, of the University of Toronto, who developed a machine learning algorithm to select eight potential signals of interest from the many background noise and interference in data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
Why are you listening in the middle of the Milky Way? “On average, one in five stars harbors a potentially habitable Earth-sized planet. Suresh says. We can maximize our chances of finding signs of alien technology by looking toward the center of our galaxy. From a game theory perspective, the nucleus of the Milky Way is Schelling’s potential point, the theory that when two messengers cannot communicate, they tend to select certain patterns that are relevant to them. Thus, different alien worlds could establish a connection without prior contact.
(Suggested reading: Euclid Breakthrough, the space mission that will explore the mysterious dark universe)
The BLIPSS system has been the ideal gateway to dramatically improve the probability of recording technological evidence of extraterrestrial life by targeting the central region of the Milky Way. “It’s the most enticing area for further investigation because it’s space with such a dense concentration of potentially habitable stars and exoplanets,” Suresh says. This would also be, according to the team of specialists, the ideal location for aliens wishing to contact the galaxy to choose.
Paying attention to Suresh makes one believe hearing about aliens is an imminent reality. Our study attempted to find evidence of intelligent aliens by observing the sky to replicate patterns produced by their technology. We looked for a series of pulses that repeated in a similar way to the pulses used in radar transmissions. Unfortunately, Our searches haven’t turned up any pulsating signals of alien technologies present in the roughly 600,000 studied stars at the center of our galaxy.. But we are expanding our searches using multiple radio telescopes around the world. In doing so, we aspire to extract large swaths of unexplored signal parameters, for example, repetition rate, bandwidth, and average pulse brightness. We haven’t heard them, but we’re keeping our ears open.”
Flavia Tumailo
For the nation (Argentina) – GDA
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