New Chip For Square Kilometer Radio Telescope 88
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Aus reported on a new low-noise chip that could help in building the $1.6B Square Kilometer Array, the world's largest radio telescope. Wikipedia claims the telescope will be 50 times as sensitive as current instruments. It will have a resolution able to detect every active galactic nucleus out to a redshift of 6, when the universe was less than 1 billion years old and way crazy. It will have the sensitivity to detect Earth-like radio leakage at a distance of several hundred to a few thousand light years, which could help greatly with the search for extraterrestrial life. The chip's designer, Prof. Jack Singh, commented on the chip's ability to help with quantum computing research, due to its ability to operate at millikelvin temperatures, necessary to prevent quantum decoherence."
Porn - first proof of ET's... (Score:1, Funny)
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Pictures of the universe when it was only in it's "way crazy" first billions!
Barely legal!!!
HOTT planet on planet action!!!!! [wikipedia.org]
Re:Porn - first proof of ET's... (Score:5, Funny)
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It will have a resolution of able to detect every active galactic nucleus out to a redshift of 6, when the universe was less than 1 billion years old and way crazy.
Was it trying to kill itself? [slashdot.org] was it safe for work? [slashdot.org] Or was it, like me, buying beer, pot, and hookers? [slashdot.org]
Crazy? The craziest part of the universe is Springfield! [slashdot.org]
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low noise chip (Score:4, Funny)
They'd better not waste it on SETI (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if we find life outside our solar system, the aftermath would not be worth-while. We would most likely not be able to communicate with them, and even if we could, we would have to perfect quantum mechanics and have teleportation working properly before communication is practical.
Re:They'd better not waste it on SETI (Score:4, Funny)
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Whatever you get by piggybacking an observation is, by definition, free.
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At first glance you'd think so, but at second glance you start to see the costs of recording media, transmission of data, etc. Those costs become non-trivial quite rapidly as your volume of "free" observations go up.
I don't know the current status of the "pipeline" between the Areceibo radio telescope and the SETI
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"Even if Christopher Columbus discovers something over there, we'd have to perfect a new method of travel which won't take months to take us to the new land. Why bother? Cancel the exploration" - Queen Isabella
Good thing not everyone has reasons as poorly as you.
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I'd say the question of ETI is not only inherently interesting, but important [gmu.edu] as well, since it has direct implications for our continued survival as a species, and even what we should do to maximize our chances.
I'll take species survival over a lot of things, including a cure for cancer.
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Well, I agree that a SETI success is probably very unlikely, how "useful" is anything that a radiotelescope does? It's only purpose is to observe,
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Maybe they have good TV with plotlines we haven't already seen!!
technically (Score:5, Funny)
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Sorry to bitch but... (Score:3, Funny)
[J]
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You are getting your news feeds through Slashdot, ya know =P
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We're always glad to see a new slashdot member here. Your welcome packet is in the mail!
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Yep, that's some high ass resolution all right.
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Sorry, she can't do it for you as she died back in '03. And don't talk about her like that!
iRonically... (Score:5, Funny)
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"Wikipedia claims" (Score:5, Informative)
Millikelvins (Score:3, Funny)
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Is it true... (Score:4, Funny)
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Low noise (Score:5, Informative)
It's not explained in the article, but the reason for the very low temperature operation is resistor thermal noise [wikipedia.org]. Basically, any resistor (or anything with vaguely resistor-like properties, for example the radio antenna itself) creates "thermal noise" from the thermally-induced effects of electrons bouncing around. At room temperature (300K), that noise is 4E-21 watts per 1Hz bandwidth -- or about -130dBm on a fairly narrow 10kHz bandwidth. The noise generated varies linearly with temperature, so if the entire input amplifier is operated at 300mK instead of 300K, you get an extra 30dB of signal-to-noise ratio, which is substantial when you're looking for very very weak signals.
Fun fact: with a $5 op-amp, a few resistors, and an audio amplifier, you can create your own, entirely quantum, true white noise source from the same effect. Guaranteed good for cryptographic random number generation, impressing your friends, and preventing dates!
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All those SACD players cannot beat the roles of physics, which mean that everything after bit 19 or so is just thermal noice. No matter how expensive the audiophile voodoo happens to be.
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Well, getting better than 16 bits takes work, but isn't exactly that hard. And since computers like to work in 8-bit chunks, it should be no surprise that 24 bits was the next choice. And even if all you plan to do is adjust the volume on the different tracks, apply an equalization curve, and then mix a few tracks together, you should be doing all that in 24 bits. Sure, 24 bits is ovrekill, but it's easily better than 16 bits, and a 19-bit sample size would just be silly.
Use 24 bits during all the proc
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Actually, that hissing noise is the joke flying over your head.
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You're exactly right for noise voltage, but since power = v^2/r, and v ~ sqrt(r), power is independent of resistance. Lower valued resistors produce lower voltage noise (which usually matters) and higher current noise (which usually doesn't matter as much), and so are better for noise in the vast majority of circuit designs. The power is then P = kTRB. The factor of two difference is based on half the power going into the resistor and half into the impedance-matched amplifier input, and can be removed or
I don't even know what that means. (Score:3, Funny)
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The most depressing thing in the world.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's only been a hundred years since we started throwing decent amounts of radio waves into the sky.
You know, I never really thought about it that way. The odds of ET being outside of 100 light years is astronomically better than within 100 light years.
However, on a different train of thought - what are the odds of current civilization living another 1000 years? I mean, we already have weapons that could decimate the entire world population within a matter of days. I hate to be a pessimist, but I can't help but think that the more knowledge we gather, the more likely we are to blow everyone up (not to m
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The more advanced we are, the more likely colonizing other planets becomes, giving us built in redundancy. Hopefully it gets do
what about the nukes in space? (Score:2)
Im sure this would have been noticed by someone given the burst of gamma rays etc...
What about LOFAR? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.lofar.org/ [lofar.org]
But it might depend a bit on how one bends definitions (min/max distance between receivers etc.)..
"The antennas are simple enough but there are a lot of them - 25000 in the full LOFAR design. To make radio pictures of the sky with adequate sharpness, these antennas are to be arranged in clusters that are spread out over an area of ultimately 350 km in diameter. (In phase 1 that is currently funded 15000 antenna's and maximum baselines of 100 km will be built). Data transport requirements are in the range of many Tera-bits/sec and the processing power needed is tens of Tera-FLOPS."
http://www.lofar.org/p/geninfo.htm [lofar.org]
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redshift of 6? (Score:2)
Re:redshift of 6? (Score:4, Informative)
The quantity 1+z is the ratio of the scale of the universe now to the scale of the universe at that redshift. Our local area (Milky Way galaxy) corresponds to z=0. So, for example, the universe was 7 times smaller at z=6, and the density of intergalactic gas is proportional to (1+z)^3.
Hold on a sec... (Score:1)
Horrible communication of the future? (Score:4, Funny)
Earth: Hi this is Bill from the planet Earth!
Aliens: Hello Bill this is Zargo from Optimum Prime, what do you want?
Earth: Hi, this is Ted. We'd like to know more about you!
Aliens: What happened to Bill?
Earth: Hi, this is Jane. Bill and Ted are Dead.
Aliens: What?!
Surely if Aliens are 1 thousand light years away it would take 6 thousand years to have that conversation. Although we'd probably just spam them all of Earth's Knowledge which would piss off the aliens into believing our planet is full of spammers and destroy us...
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The Big Picture? (Score:2)
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sorry mine crashes somewhere past 1e20km - I thought you could go further
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Looks like the best major link (adding the Deep space catalogs) - I believe the addon's for celestia run to Tb (mostly the Moon and Mars) so it may be hard to find what you want
"According to Wikipedia"? (Score:1)