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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..
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
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
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.
would be discovering other life in the Universe, but never the drive to carry us there.