3 ms·
My intuition is that this is unlikely, but I'd love to see someone do the math. Given the scale of interstellar distances, any locations on our planet (and even
by stouset 11y ago
My intuition is that this is unlikely, but I'd love to see someone do the math. Given the scale of interstellar distances, any locations on our planet (and even in our solar system) are going to effectively function as a single point. Given arbitrarily-accurate measurement, it could work, but I'd bet physical limitations will prevent that from being a possibility.
To my mind, it'd be roughly like trying to triangulate an earthquake in France with three sensors in a 1mm^3 cube in NYC (scale is probably way off, I definitely didn't do the math).
- Florin_Andrei 11y agoIt would work. The delta-t is a few miliseconds. This gives enough precision for a decent estimate of the direction of the signal. Now estimating the distance is a different matter.
- lutorm 11y agoIt definitely would work. The distance to the event is irrelevant, it's the light travel time between the detectors compared to the accuracy with which you can pin the event down in time that matters. The light travel time across the Earth is of order a hundredth of a second, which is a significant fraction of an event that takes ~ a tenth of a second. However, the error ellipse will probably be quite larg, and given that they come from cosmological distances it's unlikely that they would be anything but isotropically distributed (like gamma ray bursts are).
- stouset 11y agoThis gives you the direction, but not distance which is an important component of triangulation. I should have been more clear in my original post. Is it plausible that we'll ever be able to determine distance through this method?