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New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

theguardian.com

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Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#41

Post by dang »

dipnuggetron wrote: post #19
LunaSea wrote: post #2

"How a team of astronomers embezzled crowd funders into buying them a new telescope by making them believe they will look for a 'Wow' signal explanation"

Just be glad gofundme isn't a YC portfolio company. That would have earned you a full shadowban.

The truth is the opposite. We moderate less, not more, when YC companies are involved. That is literally the first thing PG taught me about how to moderate HN; I don't think I had even sat in a chair yet before he blurted it out.

This does leave a loophole in what people are able to get away with in threads, but it is worth the price to be able to address people's concerns about it in good conscience.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#42

Post by fapjacks »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

> Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out. Can someone explain why he needs to observe them when they're passing in front of those partic…

From the comments:

"> But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out.

That is not true. There are several major facilities for which observations in January 2017 can still be applied for, and there is not a single one for which you can even yet apply for observations in January 2018. If his idea was good enough, he could submit it to the normal telescope time allocation committees. It looks like he himself knows it's not. And there is not even any reason to wait for the comets to be in a particular part of the sky. Just observe them, or any other comet, at any time, to see if they emit at that frequency."

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#43

Post by dang »

hodwik wrote: post #27
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so nastily uncharitable. I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that game here.

LunaSea is making an interesting argument that I hadn't considered. You on the other hand have levied a substance-less complaint about a user's attitude. Who is really undermining discourse here? Pessimism ought to be welcome here. If you need protection from other people's attitudes go join a university safe space.

I actually appreciate your point a lot more than it probably seems like I do (not counting the rude bit, which was out of place and wide of the mark). The counterargument only becomes compelling when you start to think practically about the effect snark etc. has on online communities. This is an externality, so it is easy to overlook and not always in the interest of individual actors to take care of.

We could compare it to a company that makes a good product (in this case, a good point about funding and the politics of research) while polluting the local environment (the community here). The solution isn't to ignore the pollution, nor to justify it.

Fortunately for all of us, it's not only possible to make the product without polluting, but the product comes out better when one does so. But this doesn't happen by default; the default is the opposite. That's why I post moderation comments, at the cost of off-topicness. In the long run, the plan (and the unsolved system design problem!) is to get the desired effect without posting such things, which are as tedious to write as they are to read.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#44

Post by samstave »

maze-le wrote: post #30
samstave wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive the naive question, but why is space so empty. I mean I understand infinite but I'm just really interested in why the universe is the way that it is. What is the best theory for this? Has anyone proposed a why?

Because the universe is expanding. Space itself expands the further away you are from a reference point. That means, everything is moving away from us (on a grand scale), and the greater the distance to the reference point, the bigger is the rate things in the universe are moving away from us. I think the rate is about 70 km/(Mpc s) - wich is an incredibly small number, scaled down to a meter it is ~10^-23 m / (m s).…

ELI5 If space is just empty nothing vacuum - how does it expand?

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#45

Post by stuartaxelowen »

e0m wrote: post #13

It's amazing how manual this process still was in the late 70s. Imagine spending hours and hours pouring over tables of numbers. At the same time, it's amazing how hard it still is for computers to say "that's interesting". Sometimes it takes human to go "wow"

That's because "interestingness" takes a _lot_ of context.

Humans interpret the low dimensional natural world into much higher dimensional space by turning things into models (cars, cats, science, etc), and often "wow" comes from a combination of many of those high level interpretations.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#46

Post by acqq »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #10
pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

> Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out. Can someone explain why he needs to observe them when they're passing in front of those partic…

I think the point is to reproduce as much of the original conditions as possible and check for a similar signature. The paper itself, does not explain the need for exact conditions: http://planetary-science.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Pari...

From the comments on the Guardian site, user bllckchps estimates the needed amount of stuff in the comet to produce the signal:

"Of course, most of the mass is in the nucleus, and will be in molecular form, unobservable at 1.4GHz. Let's be generous, and allow the comet to be made purely of water ice (H20) which will dissociate into a neutral hydrogen (H) and a hydroxyl (OH) as it goes into the halo, meaning that ~1/18 of the mass can be H.

We're already about a factor of 20 too low to explain the Wow signal, and now here's another factor of ~20. What fraction of the total mass is in the halo? Generously, maybe ~1%? So it's about a factor of 40000 too weak to be a plausible model."

The same user, regarding Antonio Paris, the person who collects the money:

"The web page for his Center for Planetary Science is pretty much just a collection of stuff taken verbatim from wikipedia. And his twitter feed is mostly a collection of uncredited images taken from whoever/wherever, interspersed with exhortations to send him cash for this ridiculous project.

If you follow up the various programmes he has been "involved" in (candidate astronaut etc) you will see that they are distinctly less impressive than they might at first seem to the naive. "

Fascinatingly, according to Antonio Paris' LinkedIn profile, he got a Master degree in 2012 and immediately started to refer to himself as "Professor Paris" in the "Area 51" documentary directed by... himself!

His "astronaut candidate" program:

http://projectpossum.org/possum-astronaut-program/training-p...

Wow, indeed.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#47

Post by throweway »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #39
alsertia wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is this a correct understanding? No. That is a five-year-old's understanding of how science works. HN's readership quality has definitely declined if every phenomenon without an obvious explanation is immediately attributed to "aliens" or "beyond our understanding of the cosmos."

Nowhere did he mention "aliens".

I think E.T. refers to alien. If he means from outside of Earth generally ... well that is tautological. So I assume he means aliens.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#49

Post by jsprogrammer »

Falcon9 wrote: post #9
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so nastily uncharitable. I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that game here.

Thanks, dang. It was once true that a surefire way to rack up a large amount of karma in HN was to make a nasty, uncharitable statement like that. I've experienced the weird ridiculous thrill of it myself, on another account, along with the deflating realization that I'm being rewarded (such as it is, karma having no actual value) for participating in the destruction of civilized discourse. I appreciate you actively…

>karma having no actual value

I believe additional HN abilities are granted based on an account's karma number.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#50

Post by scrollaway »

throweway wrote: post #47
michaelcampbell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere did he mention "aliens".

I think E.T. refers to alien. If he means from outside of Earth generally ... well that is tautological. So I assume he means aliens.

How is it tautological? Signals like that can be terrestrial in nature. In fact, recent story:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/05/microwave-par...

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