Viewing profile — RedOrGreen

Yes, in a way. Think of a single dish radio telescope as a one-pixel camera, where measuring the emission intensity at each point in the sky lets you build up a map. Typically, thi…

Very nice, even with no planes overhead. But it looks like the map orientation is reversed (off by 180 degrees)? Real bug, or just me?

Oof, yes, I didn't even mention corporate compliance.

Paraphrasing: "If you don't want to, don't sideload apps, no one is forcing you to" - do people really not see the problem? It's not that technically unsophisticated users will wan…

I came to this thread a bit too late, but if you're interested in the actual signal that Stella found, take a look at the spectrum vs time on the NASA release [1] - third plot on t…

Allow me to gently contradict the previous responders. The community of radio astronomers is feeling the loss of Arecibo very keenly. I've mentioned this in a previous comment [1] …

I'm too sad today to engage with the discussion here, but I'll just mention, for those of you who think that Arecibo has either "outlived its usefulness" or been supplanted by FAST…

I'm too sad today to engage with this, but you're simply wrong about Arecibo "having done all the useful things it could do ages ago, and not finding anything new". Here, for examp…

> If the full hundred hours was such a huge risk, why not take, like, 5-10 photos first to see if you get much of anything? Seems like they would have been able to know pretty earl…

HST is in a 96-minute orbit, up to half of which is blocked by the Earth, depending on where in the sky you point it. Getting time on it is an extremely competitive process - the r…

This is a comparison of images, not just catalogs of sources in images. If you look at the image in the linked article, you can easily spot one of the stars that has "gone missing"…

Sure, that's an excellent point. In case you read late replies: we recognize this, and parameterize the burst energy [1] by a beaming scale factor, \Delta\Omega/4\pi. (It still dro…

We measure the energy of signals received at our radio telescopes - our units are Janskys, which correspond to 10^-26 watts per square metre per hertz of bandwidth, and we can cali…

Yes, we're not going to do optical VLBI soon, but the reason is deeper... I just wrote out a long comment [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674563

Calling it a "really fast camera" elides much of the actual difficulty. We're trying to tag individual wavefronts of light at different telescopes, record them, and then play them …

(I haven't watched the video, but I do have professional expertise on this topic.) With interferometry, you're getting an incomplete sampling of the Fourier transform of the sky im…

For pulses or bursts of emission, we like compact objects, just from light-travel-time arguments. I would say that the leading models involve very young, highly magnetic neutron st…

It's a full interferometer, although for the pulsar and FRB modes, they are tiling the field of view with many, many phased array beams. (Yes, the computation requirements are horr…

Would you care to elaborate on what you find objectionable about Face ID? Just like the fingerprint reader, all data is stored on the device secure enclave, and does not leave the …

Yes, the authors discuss the implications for scalar-tensor theories, and it doesn't look great for many of them. The Nature News and Views article by Clifford Will [1] offers a de…

We can do even better some of the time - for example, we can get to ~few nanosecond timing precision for pulsars like J1909-3744 [1], which is equivalent to measuring (changes in) …

I'm too close to this topic for a chatty comment, but I'll just point to this IAU meeting: "Pulsar Astrophysics: The Next 50 years"[1]. It was held this September at Jodrell Bank, …

> I hold out hope the NS-NS rumor is true, that paper is just taking a bit longer to prepare. Mark October 16th on your calendar.

I guess this is cool, but not really that novel a result (and yeah, it's an ATel, not a paper yet, although that's just a matter of time). We've seen similar burst storms from this…

And they haven't even tracked down the location of the source as well as it sounds. They detected a burst, and found a fading radio source in that field of view, but there's a dece…