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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.
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.
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I doubt anyone will win a Nobel prize for this discovery but your question falls in the same line as: "what good is the discovery of black holes", or "what good is the knowledge of how many types of stars are there" -- (O, B, A, F, G, K, M).
Science has been at work for ages, and many discoveries are made just for sake of curiosity. Do you feel curious only about useful things? Your question above gives away the answer to mine...
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.
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.
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Eliminating camouflage and noise, to see what's in plain sight all along... Sounds somewhat Zen...
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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.
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