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New Chip For Square Kilometer Radio Telescope
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."
Great, I can eat 'em in bed without the wife complaining..
I hope they put this toward something useful, rather than blow its time on SETI.
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.
Yeah, baby!
Pictures of the universe when it was only in it's "way crazy" first billions!
Barely legal!!!
HOTT planet on planet action!!!!!
the era of Way Crazy is not the correct term for the billion year old universe. the billion year old universe is known as the You Gotta Be Freakin Kiddin Me Epoch, not to be confused with the You Gotta Be Freakin Nuts Epoch much earlier. Way Crazy is a specific terminology for the time period between supersymmetry breaking and the formation of the quark-gluon plasma, aka the Thats Outta Sight Man era
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a bit off topic but can someone please edit this summary. Did you even read it? Terrible grammar.
[J]
you still need to crank the volume all the way up to get your iPod FM transmitter to work...
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
That claim actually comes straight from the Square Kilometer Array website.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Cool baby, cool.
....that the chips were actually salvaged from a fleet of BBC television detector vans?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's not explained in the article, but the reason for the very low temperature operation is resistor thermal noise. 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!
We already sent them porn via snail mail, the next logical step is to start trading via radiotelescope. Hope they liked the first stuff.
Will my taxes go up because of it?
would be discovering other life in the Universe, but never the drive to carry us there.
http://www.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
Redshift (z) is a unitless ratio. It used as a (nonlinear) measure of distance in extra-galactic astronomy and cosmology.
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.
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...
Im not sure that we would want to be trading porn with an alien species. What if they all look like jabba the hut? Some things you cannot unsee.
Much more important for the survival of our species, let's hope the SETI people on Earth aren't slashdot trolls sending goatse to the aliens.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.