Slashdot Mirror
Stars Billions Of Years Old Drop Big Clue To Early Universe (cnet.com)
Astronomers have picked up a radio signal from the moment the lights went on in the universe billions of years ago, and they've discovered some surprises embedded in it. No, not aliens, but potential evidence of something just as mysterious and elusive. From a report: Using a sensitive antenna only about the size of a table in the Australian desert, scientists managed to isolate the very faint signal of primordial hydrogen, part of the cosmic afterglow from the Big Bang. But the ancient signal from this basic building block of the universe also carries the imprint of some of the first light from the very first stars ever. "This is the first real signal that stars are starting to form, and starting to affect the medium around them," Alan Rogers, a scientist at MIT's Haystack Observatory, said in a statement. "What's happening in this period is that some of the radiation from the very first stars is starting to allow hydrogen to be seen. It's causing hydrogen to start absorbing the background radiation, so you start seeing it in silhouette, at particular radio frequencies." Rogers is a co-author of a paper on the work published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Is from GOD...
So... how big is a table in the Australian desert?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well a rock in the austrailian desert is over 2 miles long, so you guess :)
A ball of string could go around it approximately ten times if that gives you a better idea of its actual size.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
So... how big is a table
Well, I've personally been to the Library of Congress, and they have about 100 tables there. So a table is about 0.01 LoC.
In Australia, it would 0.01 LoC mate.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The real question is will the table try to kill you, as do most things in Australia.
The real question is how such an Australian table will try to kill you.
Automatically starts a ?video? when I open it?? I scrolled the whole page and couldn't even find it. But I hear its audio playing. What the fuck? FUCK YOU FOR POSTING THIS.
Let me ask little Bobby Tables. I'll be ri
Well the one outside the desert is about 32,000km^2
I'm trying to come up with a car analogy...but it keeps failing me. It's like trying to find a car in the fog without the headlights on.
/. er from Melbourne here. No, not the one in Florida. Even I was curious about what made tables in the Australian desert an unusual or exceptional subcategory of 'table'. We don't often get to discuss the Platonic theory of forms on slashdot; maybe the time has now come. On the other hand, a casual clickbait answer to this question could lead to discussion of the Nullarbor Plain, a former seabed that is so flat you can see the curvature of the Earth. It's been uplifted by geological events and could be considered a significant tableland, although it's never described as such.
"how big is a table in the Australian desert?"
Big enough to seat 4 people I suppose
One 'Jolly Swag man' and 3 'troopers'
Stars that old would have had plastic surgery by now . . .
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The size of a table in the Australian desert.
The size of a table in a typical Texas backyard.
Lots of people here fixated on Australian tables (I've visited, they have nice tables).
No discussion of any of the actual findings though.
So far Dark Matter appears to interact only through the gravitational force, even with itself.
If, as this study suggests, "only cooling of the gas as a result of interactions between dark matter and baryons seems to explain the observed amplitude" and that interaction is anything other than a purely gravitational one, it will be the first evidence of Dark Matter interacting at all except through gravity. That could make this a really big deal. In about five years the first phase of the Square Kilometer Array should be able to greatly expand our ability to investigate this.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj