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Domain: astron.nl
Stories and comments across the archive that link to astron.nl.
Stories · 2
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Advanced Civilizations Probably Don't Exist In Our Galactic Neighborhood
schwit1 writes: New observations of the best candidate galaxies now suggest that advanced civilizations are very rare or don't exist in the local universe. Researchers looked at several hundred nearby galaxies that emitted a high amount of mid-infrared radiation (abstract), which could possibly be produced as the waste heat from civilizations using energy on galactic scales.
They found: "The presence of radio emission at the levels expected from the correlation, suggests that the mid-IR emission is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust — for example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formation. As Professor Garrett explains: 'the original research at Penn State has already told us that such systems are very rare but the new analysis suggests that this is probably an understatement, and that advanced Kardashev Type III civilizations basically don't exist in the local Universe.'"
Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume. -
350 KM Diameter Radio Telescope Array
photonic writes "Yesterday the Dutch government awarded a 52 Million Euro grant (press release in Dutch) to the Lofar, or Low Frequency Array telescope. Instead of traditional single large disk, the telescope will consist of 25000 small base stations, which are each not much more than small omni-directional antennas. Together they will be used as a phased array with enormous resolution. The base stations will be spread out across the northern part of the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Eventually, the telescope will be part of an international collaboration, with additional arrays planned by MIT and in Australia. There are also plans to add more sensors to the base stations to form a distributed network for monitoring weather, earthquakes and the like. The array should be finished in 2006 and will cost around 150 MEuro total. The telescope will also be very interesting from an IT point of view: Dedicated fiber optical cables will be needed for the enormous amount of data transport (Tera-bits/second). This was actually used as a big selling point, because some rural areas will get fast internet access as an aside. There are contacts with IBM to use one of their future Blue Gene supercomputers for the central data processing. An English brochure is available with more details."