![]() Viewed through the lens of visible light (with much shorter wavelengths than radio waves), that's true. It might seem like the great, vast, black ether of space is awfully quiet. Radio telescopes from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. The amount of energy collected in radio astronomy's history is less than the energy needed to melt a snowflake."Įven so, they reveal momentous events in our galaxy, and beyond. "If you took your cell phone and put it on the moon, it would be one of the brightest radio sources in the sky," Cendes explained. "Since the dawn of radio astronomy, this is what astronomers do. That's why astronomers must use behemoth antennas to find them. To us, they're like whispers drifting through the wind. These detected radio waves often come from almost incomprehensibly distant galaxies, many light-years away. They tell people, 'It's not aliens,'" Yvette Cendes, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable. And they aren't attempts at intergalactic communication. Radio waves are extremely valuable to detect using giant dished-shaped antennas because they reveal fascinating, extremely far-off events that we can't otherwise see, like stars exploding or black holes munching on cosmic dust. In reality, our planet is constantly bombarded with radio waves, which are a type of energy or light naturally produced all over the cosmos (like visible light or X-rays). Yet today, some 90 years later, you've undoubtedly seen headlines promoting more "strange radio signals coming from deep space." They're among the most clicked on internet space stories. Indeed, the radio waves weren't signals from aliens. When the New York Times first wrote about "mysterious radio waves" from the cosmos in 1933, they made sure to note one fundamental caveat: " No Evidence of Interstellar Signaling."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |