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Listening for Deuterium
jose parinas writes "Researchers at MIT made the first radio detection of deuterium, an atom that the scientists claim is key to understanding the beginning of the universe." It turns out the actual detection wasn't the key, but filtering out all of the RF 'pollution' produced by nearby gadgets.
KHAAAAAAAAAAN!
Bur is this substance useful for anything?
"At times, Rogers asked for help from Haystack's neighbors, and in several instances replaced a certain brand of answering machine that was sending out a radio signal with one that did not interfere with the experiment. The interference caused by one person's stereo system was solved by having a part on the sound card replaced by the factory."
So how can they prove Mr. Alien doesn't have dodgy sound cards too, and these are giving false positives?
When these measurements are even disturbed by EMI due to sources that aren't even supposed to be radiating at all, they apparently are very sensitive. Why don't they do them somewhere else, far from civilisation? Also, how can they be sure that what is measured is actually this deuterium and not another very weak terrestrial noise source?
Most of the more important ramifications for this sort of discovery aren't related to WHEN it started, but HOW it started, which helps to understand how exactly the fundamental physical forces of the universe work and fit together.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
If they can find a good way to locate large amounts of deuterium they will be one step closer to making nuclear fusion a viable source of energy.
Deuterium reacts well with Tritium in fusion to produce a large amount of energy.
insightful? only on slashdot...
Glad to see that I could score something other than that irritating 0 score all the time :-). Bad Karma, I guess, huh?
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When looking for a needle in a haystack, never expect it to be much more than a needle. But that is neither hear nor there.
But yes, deuterium is useful. It keeps your local star going when the base hydrogen fuel is getting exhausted. It acts as a handy intermediate step on the way to all those useful heavy elements produced by your local supernova, which can the collapse under gravity to give you a handy planet to live on which has something in it a bit more varied than plain old hydrogen. And, if you find a star a bit inconveniently large to use as a heat source, you can use deuterium oxide as a moderator when you invent fission reactors, and generate useful amounts of electricity without blowing things up too often. The Deuterium Marketing Board (a division of Intelligent Design Industries) has the slogan "Deuterium: it's part of why you're here to read about it."
Mind you, if you're a carbon based life form, you can have more fun mutating your genetic sequence if you use tritium.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
What, you mean Voyager's science may not be 100% accurate? You're telling me that gravity isn't radioactive?
('Equinox Part II' and 'One Small Step' are the guilty episodes from above, if you were wondering...)
You must think in Russian.
There's this thing called an ocean, with lots of hydrogen in it. Quite a bit of deuterium oxide can be extracted from it. In fact, back in the 1940s the Norwegians were extracting heavy water via a hydroelectric plant at Vemork.
Discovering more deuterium than we have in the oceans might be interesting but doesn't seem very necessary in the near term.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Makes you wonder if this could ever have been pulled off if BPL was already widely implemented...
Eliminating camouflage and noise, to see what's in plain sight all along... Sounds somewhat Zen...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
presently has an enormous excess of deuterium...
Oh well, what the hell...
Its interesting that this might bring light to the EMI and RF radiation that is all around us. The work to filter out that noise and reduce it will go quite a long ways toward making wireless broadband more available, toward making things more capable, quiet, and efficient. This amounts to a step toward making RF polution a problem that needs to be addressed. Sort of like taking lead out of computer parts, but taking unneeded and nasty RF out of the airwaves. That would give more spectrum, and better use of the spectrum that is used. This is good.
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The signal they are looking for is the 327 MHz emission line of deuterium.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I work in recording studios and find RF to be a huge problem every day. Even when using balanced audio. I'm curious to know what methods they are using to get rid of the GIGANTIC amounts of RF pollution they they're encountering.
Ignore Alien Orders
http://lyrics.rare-lyrics.com/D/Deuterium/Picnik.h tml
Slow slashdot news day......
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The quality of the "research" coming out of MIT seems to be slipping a bit. It's common knowledge to those who work with EEG devices and other electronics that work in the pico, nano, and micro volt ranges that background noise is the biggest problem to getting useful data. Why it's taken an MIT researcher until 2005 to uncover the same principles that have been known to the rest of the scientific community for 7 decades is a bit confounding. Next thing you know, they'll be releasing a report entitled: "Microwave ovens may interfere with television antenna reception." How groundbreaking.
Rather than researching the beginning of the universe, shouldn't we be more interested in the [i]end[/i] of the universe? I would rather know how we're all going to be sucked into a singularity.
All your reading ability are belong to me.
Wonder how long until the FCC tries to regulate it...
Move Sig.
Technically, this isn't the first RF detection of deuterium. Deuterium Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has been around since the 50's and uses RF to excite and receive signals from deuterium nuclei transitioning between quantum spin states that separate in energy when subjected to a magnetic field.
This may be the first extraterrestrial RF detection of deuterium and as such is pretty neat, but TFA should have been a little more careful.
I remember working in our optics lab at Rose, where we had a piece of equipment that kept giving really poor data--obviously a noise problem. I can't remember if it was the spectrum analyzer or what, but we just couldn't figure out where all this noise was coming from.
Naturally, we blamed it on the EE _power lab_ that was right above us, but I think someone eventually suggested that it might be the ballasts in the fluorescent lights in the room. I just wish I could remember what we were trying to measure.
Besides, if they went to Green Bank, they could take a railroad ride during their spare time.
Radio waves are light, not sound. They just have a longer wavelength than the light we see with our eyes. Just because we listen to audio signals on radios doesn't mean that radio waves are sound.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
Maybe YOU should've been more careful. Deuterons have integer spin. They're bosons and NMR is useless in detecting them. Thats why heavy water is used as a solvent for organic chem NMR, so the H in water doesn't swamp the signal.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
but it's DILITHIUM we need if we're ever going to get off this godforsaken rock!
The true opportunity is for science to look on the universe with new eyes. Look at the advances that looking at the sun in H-alpha did? What about the EUV Observitory?
This is an extrodinary opportinuty.
And furthuring Richard Feyman's work.
and its O,B,A,F,G,K,M,N,S. ( N,S are those tricky off-sequence type stars ).
Deuterium nuclei do have spin-1, which NMR is perfectly capable of detecting. In fact, many spectrometers use the deuterium NMR signal from deuterated solvents for shimming (compensating for magnetic field inhomogenieties typically introduced by the sample). Nuclei that have spin-0 (e.g. Calcium) are the ones that cannot be detected by NMR.
As an AC mentioned, the resonance frequency is different, so it just doesn't appear in the 1H NMR spectra. For example, on a commmon NMR spectrometer (7 Tesla), 1H (protons) resonate at 300 MHz and 2H (deuterium nuceli) resonate at 46 MHz.
It turns out the actual detection wasn't the key, but filtering out all of the RF 'pollution' produced by nearby gadgets.
Thanks for ruining the ending!
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network