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An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal
- cosmiccatnap 4y agoSadly 1800 light years away means transmission to 2MASS 19281982-2640123 is impractical at best but observing it more to determine if other techno signals originate is a worthwhile endeavor. The ghosts of a distant civilization may still hold clues and even the knowledge that 1800 years ago we were potentially not alone is still an existential epiphany we are all hoping for.
- vinni2 4y ago1800 years is a not that long in the cosmic scale.
- teekert 4y ago3600 for a return message. But think about what we looked like 1800 years ago and what will we look like in 1800 years? Will we still use radio even?
- Ekaros 4y agoI would guess that if we are technologically advanced species we will. Though there is really question could we discern those signals. Probably there would be push to maximise the usage of available spectrum and then minimize use of power and probably even look into massive mimo.
- bdamm 4y agoOr would we have transitioned to highly directed laser pulses, or perhaps using a medium not yet discovered? Since we are still fumbling in the dark about fundamental physics, having no grand unifying theory between large and small, or even much progress in understanding gravity, it is entirely possible that we wouldn't be using radio because we found something much better.
- tsimionescu 4y agoA small note: a Grand Unified Theory is not a theory that unifies the large and small (presumably you mean something that solves the measurement problem in QM), it is a single theory that unifies the electro-weak force and the strong force, leaving us with just two fundamental forces: the unified one and gravity. Solving the measurement problem is necessary for having a complete picture of the universe, but a GUT is not - it is logically possible for the universe to have several different fundamental forces; but it's not logically possible for the macrocosm not to be reducible to the movement of its constituent particles.
- colechristensen 4y agoIt is not at all unreasonable for an advanced civilization to have lifespans in the thousands of years or simply be unbounded.
- mhh__ 4y agoOther than as an inception agreement for a cult (has someone already written that book, other than L Ron Hubbard) 1800 years is unfortunately a very long time in the scale of any human project.
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoI guess it would depend on the ship... Though I am reading Rendezvous With Rama right now (my first time), which has completely changed my imagining of space ships. So much of sci-fi owes so much to Artur C. Clarke. I knew, but I didn't realize until I read more and more =/
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago> guess it would depend on the ship After 72 generations on a ship, it’s possible the occupants won’t even know they are on a ship (fictionalized by Brian Aldiss in the excellent book “Non-Stop”). And if they know they’re on a ship, why would they leave? After all, it is home and will have been for ages.
- Ekaros 4y agoAlso if you can build a space habitat that can support 72 generations. Why ship it away anyway? That is bit nasty move to those eventual descendants. Instead put it orbit somewhere in system. Where you have at least chance to maintain or rescue the people. And save a lot on propulsion. Just build enough of them house people you need. I never understood the whole colonization for sake of colonization. In past it was either glory or better living conditions. And you will have much better living conditions if you don't send it to empty space on unknown risky voyage...
- lostmsu 4y ago3600 years later: sorry, your bug report was closed due to inactivity.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoI just hope the aliens don't see JIRA's UI then decide our planet is better off harvested for its quark energy.
- stephbu 4y agoMaybe in 1,700yrs they'll see us...
- beaned 4y agoThis part is intriguing to me: > In fact, if we analyse the history of (the few) radio signals that humanity have sent to several targets in the hope of contacting a civilization, none of those transmissions had a long duration or were repeatedly sent for a long time. [...] An extraterrestrial civilization could have opted to behave in a similar manner.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoExcept SETI sends the equivalent of a greeting card, it would be futile to send a big buzz without information because the huge distances forbid a conversation. This means that the WOW signal should have decoder-friendly information, but IIRC it didn't.
- spindle 4y agoIt's not just the region of the sky with the most radio signals, it's the region of the sky with the signal that's (arguably) most likely to be produced by intelligence, of the ones we've noticed so far - the "WOW!" signal.
- abemiller 4y agoYea this title is not on the mark. it's not a region with the "most" radio signals at all. The concern of the paper is only about the Wow! signal.
- bewalt 4y agoIt was tough to keep the title accurate since I had to change it with the character limit. Thanks for clarifying for everyone!
- pvg 4y agoThe original title An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal seems to fit the limit just fine.
- SllX 4y agoFrom the guidelines. > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. & > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. I could see why the OP wanted to edit it if they were following the submission guidelines. You can make a case to keep the original title as is, but you can also make the case that “WOW! Signal” in the original title sounds like linkbait. So if there’s an error here, it looks like a good faith error in an attempt to follow the guidelines. :)
- pvg 4y agoIt isn't actually clickbait and unfortunately, almost everything in the re-written title is wrong - another reason to stick to original titles.
- callamdelaney 4y agoWe are definitely not alone. The great filter, in my opinion, does not exist. It's only the vastness of space and the relatively short time a civilization produces radio signals that makes it appear this way.
- bpodgursky 4y agoThat's a pretty shallow view of the Great Filter. Your implicit assumption is that not a single other intelligent species decided to harness the universe by, for example, consuming stars for their raw matter, or building Dyson spheres to black out entire sections of the sky. It is imo on you to explain why there's a hard cap on the exponential growth of intelligent life that prevents it from EVER reorganizing the universe in its own image. Not 99% of the time — that's not enough for these purposes.
- Ekaros 4y agoThe truth might be than physics are harsh mistress and there is no way to cheat. Thus actually working extra system space colonization is just not something that we or anyone else can do. Maybe even technology to do stellar engineering is out of reach.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoSpace colonization is best done by robotic ships. These could very well be plying the galaxy and just staying away from primitive life.
- evo_9 4y agoReading the Abstract I can't help but wonder if their scientists discovered the same thing about us and pointed their 'eyes' (or whatever!) this way. Fun to think about.
- runnerup 4y agoWell it's 1933 light years away, so maybe they will sometime after Earth year 3853 AD.
- jmyeet 4y agoNot the first time I've said this but it's highly unlikely that we'll detect technological civilizations through radio emissions. We've had this kind of radio emission but it's incredibly brief so for Earth, you'd have to be listening for a few decades over the billions of years Earth has existed. That's incredibly unlikely. The far more likely detection method is IR signatures, specifically from Dyson Swarms. A Dyson Swarm is not a rigid sphere (a confusion caused in part by the original name "Dyson Sphere"). It is a collection of orbitals with the intent of making full use of a star's energy output. The beauty of this is it's all rather low-tech needing little more than solar power, stainless steel level materials science and (this is the big one but is an engineering problem not a science one) getting access to basic raw materials. Just like a cloud looks solid despite being water droplets, a complete Dyson Swarm would be the same. The visible light would be blocked out. But here's where the IR part comes in. The only way to dissipate heat in space is to radiate it away. A habitat will have to do this. At any reasonable temperature the signature of that radiated heat is as IR radiation determined by the temperature of the radiating object. That's physics. So if you see stars with low visible light output but shines like a beacon in the IR specturm (comparatively) that's a good candidate for a Dyson Swarm because stars don't otherwise look anything like that. This is what makes any "Hidden Aliens" type scenarios rather implausible. You just can't hide these things. Let me add this perspective: on Earth we consume (IIRC) about 10^11 Watts of energy. The Sun's energy output is in the order of 10^26 Watts. It is almost unfathomable what you could do with that much power. That's using humanity's entire energy consumption about every 30 nanoseconds. So what's more likely: 1. Detecting a few decades of radio emissions or 2. the IR signature of what would likely be millions of years? So I applaud any investigation into the wow! signal just like I do of FRBs. We should understand likely causes but technological life? It almost certainly isn't.
- erdos4d 4y agoI can't understand SETI at all. We have been listening to the sky for over 40 years with radio scopes and have found nothing, yet funding is persistently available to keep it up. Meanwhile, there are credible reports of UFO/UAP/whatever flying about and nobody will put sensors out to try to gather data on those things. Just recently the US congress has hearings about how the US does not really control its own airspace due to these objects buzzing about, many of which are reported to so radically outperform available human tech that there is only one plausible explanation for them. Yet the SETI community is complete crickets on this issue. Is the goal of SETI to fail? Is it just a radio astronomer job program? Is the UFO stigma really that great? I honestly don't understand doing something that fails consistently when there is ample evidence of a successful outcome by observing things right here on Earth.
- macksd 4y agoPossibly it's just a matter of astronomers being particularly interested in this topic and pursuing it the way they're best qualified to, because we happen to already have all sorts of equipment for gathering signals. I like the idea of gathering more data on UFO sightings as there have been very credible reports shared by the military lately, but what other sensors do you think would be practical to deploy? They may happen a lot overall, but you can't predict where to place sensors. We see them now because someone happens to have a camera pointed in the right direction, or because they show up on some broad-area radar. What else could be deployed in a practical way to gather meaningful data?
- akvadrako 4y agoThe reason is that there are no credible reports of UFOs that make one think alien.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoThey observe things right here on Earth, even up to the orbit of satellites. That effort, no matter how secretive, is very well funded. Now, looking for a needle in the universal hay stack takes time and dedication, you can't seriously expect a massive sky scan to be completed in four decades, specially when the funding is not that generous.
- wumpus 4y agoThe actual article title is "An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MattPalmer1086 4y agoDon't editorialise the title. The actual title is "An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal" It does not say that a sun like star was found in a region of the sky with the "most" radio signals. You can find sun like stars anywhere. It's an analysis of whether there are sun like stars in a region of the sky where the "wow!" signal was detected. That signal was extremely powerful, but has never been detected again.
- dang 4y agoOK, we've changed the title above. Submitted title was "Sun-like star found in the region of the sky that has most radio signals".
- pigtailgirl 4y agohttps://astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2020/11/2Mass.jpg https://astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/... picture of it from PanSTARRS/ DR1--
- 29athrowaway 4y agoIt's the Grox empire https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Grox https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Grox
- therein 4y agoHas anyone heard anything about a supposedly classified version of the story that goes into deeper detail as to why this signal was even more significant? How would you feel if 6EQUJ5 happened to be the passphrase for the day that the operator used tty into the telescope's systems? I guess if anything, it increases the chances that there is some memory leak or buffer overflow somewhere.
- anonymouse008 4y agoI would be delighted if this WOW! Signal was like the Interstellar books falling off the shelf — if you know you know
- jliptzin 4y agoI have always wondered, how do astronomers identify a particular star? I assume there’s some kind of coordinate system, but how do they keep track of everything with star systems revolving around galaxies which itself are also moving and/or rotating as well as the earth moving and the universe always expanding?
- ceejayoz 4y agoSpectrum, brightness, etc. all help, but mostly the fact that they don't move relative to other stars very fast on a human timeframe. Even the closest star only shows motion over a decade or so. https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2013/22/3192-Image.html?news=true https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2013/22/3192-Im...
- lacker 4y agoWell in practice there are Python libraries to do it for you ;-) For example Simbad: https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/simbad/simbad.html https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/simbad/simbad.ht... Stars and various other objects get string ids like "HIP19550" https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?protocol=html&Ident=HIP+19550 https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?protocol=html&Iden... Then there are a bunch of different coordinate systems, you usually want to be doing lookups like "I have this particular telescope at this particular location and orientation, how should I configure it to point at this celestial object" and there is typically some astropy library function that will figure that stuff out for you. In practice the stuff outside our solar system doesn't change its apparent motion much from our point of view. The further away an object, the less its apparent location changes. So these databases get updated every once in a while.
- yk 4y agoThat paper is bizarre. > In this article an attempt is made to create a list of the possible sources of the signal assuming that, if it was produced by an extraterrestrial civilization, their exoplanet could be similar to Earth. Citation needed. Quite simply there is no reason given, or obvious, that the exoplanet should be similar to Earth. (Though many Star Trek alien worlds look a lot like California.)
- dylan604 4y agoI've been to a couple of the planets in the Star Trek world. In fact, there's a portal right off a California highway that will transport you directly to one of these worlds if you can park your car.
- goatlover 4y agoIt's because Earth is the only planet we know of with life. In particular, the environment to support complex life long enough for an intelligent civilization to emerge. There could be other kinds of planets where this occurs, but of course we don't know about them. It could be that the conditions on Earth are a rare combination needed for intelligent civilizations. Or at least, one of the few ones.
- gfodor 4y agoA stated assumption doesn’t require a citation, it’s an assumption, not a claim.
- blululu 4y agoWhy would you even bother searching for extraterrestrial works that are not as nice as California? Nobody is going to travel 50,000 light years to get to a colder, drier Saskatchewan. In some seriousness though, the total range of possibilities is almost endless. You have to start somewhere. Best to start with things you might actually understand.
- astrange 4y agoA lot of them look like California in fire season.
- nephanth 4y agoTldr aliens like listening to radio very loudly