#murchison-widefield-array

#murchison-widefield-array

The Universe refers to everything that has, has had or will have a physical existence, including all kinds of matter and energy as well as the totality of space and time.

This system is truly extraordinary. We are seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. This galaxy acts as a lens, the way a water droplet on a window pane would, because its mass curves the local space-time. So we have a radio laser passing through a cosmic telescope before being detected by the powerful MeerKAT radio telescope.

Over the past three weeks, SpaceX has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for what amounts to a million-satellite data-center network. Musk has also said he plans to merge his AI startup, xAI, with SpaceX to pursue orbital data centers. And at an all-hands meeting last week, he told xAI employees the company would ultimately need a factory on the moon to build AI satellites-along with a massive catapult to launch them into space.

The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021. Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart. Approximately 0.1% of young quasars are expected to be doubles, with typical separations of ~10,000 light-years.

Each time we've looked at the Universe in a fundamentally new way, we didn't just see more of what we already knew what was out there. In addition, those novel capabilities allowed the Universe to surprise us, breaking records, revolutionizing our view of what was out there, and teaching us information that we never could have learned without collecting that key data.

This system is truly extraordinary. We're seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Fundamentally, masers and lasers are focused beams of light in the same frequency. In the realm of astrophysics, these can arise from clouds of dust being excited into a higher energy state from the light emitted by other sources, like stars and black holes.

A bright star in a nearby galaxy has essentially vanished. Astronomers believe that it died and collapsed in on itself, transforming into the eerie cosmic phenomenon known as a black hole. "It used to be one of the brightest stars in the Andromeda galaxy," says Kishalay De, an astronomer with Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute. "Today, it is nowhere to be seen, even with the most sensitive telescopes."

Stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near a transmitting planet can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute's scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.

Now say you want to run some modest AI stuff. That's a bigger job, so let's scale up our cubical computer with edges twice as long as before. That would make the volume eight times larger (2 3), so we could have eight times as many processors, and we need eight times as much power input-2,400 watts. However, the surface area is only four times (2 2) larger, so the radiative power would be about 4,000 watts.

One of the most exciting aspects is the rich chemistry we detect. We see dozens of different molecules, including some complex organic molecules that contain carbon, the same element that forms the basis of life on Earth. From ACES, we are learning more about how the ingredients for planets, and potentially life itself, can arise in the universe.

If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches. This statement from Dr. Vishal Gajjar highlights how stellar environmental factors may cause detectable signals to become invisible to current SETI instruments.

an electron within a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state, the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state, where it emits light of a very specific wavelength in the process. Then, pumped or injected energy re-excites an electron within that very same molecule back into that higher-energy state, over and over.

The Hubble Space Telescope displayed what the Universe looks like. Its successor, JWST, now reveals how the Universe grew up. Galaxies formed and grew massive swiftly: requiring under 300 million years. Larger-scale, more massive structures, like galaxy clusters, take longer. The earliest mature, fully-fledged cluster is CL J1001+0220. Simulations predict such clusters to appear late: after 2-3 billion years. However, proto-clusters, or still-forming galaxy clusters, appear far earlier.