Earthly folks and s@h, hark!

We have a new datasource online that is already picking up unearthly pan-galactic pulses:


Typical! You wait ages for a fast radio burst from outer space, and suddenly 13 show up

Canada CHIMES into search with new 'scope and lots of iron

Canada's new radio telescope, built to explore the early universe, has turned out to be a handy hunter for the mysterious phenomenon called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB)...

Now the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has set the astronomy world afire in announcing its findings in two papers in Nature, that during its pre-commissioning phase in July and August 2018, it spotted 13 new FRBs.

That's a decent first-pass contribution to a phenomenon that's been spotted so rarely...

... CHIME collects a bonkers 1TB of data per second for FRB detection. The 1,024 stationary intensity beams use 16,000 frequency channels, sampled each millisecond...



Any chance some of that data can be sampled for s@h?

And considering another of the "Software Defined Telescopes"... Whatever happened to the Allan Telescope Array (ATA)?

Could s@h sample some of the forthcoming Square Kilometer Array data (SKA)?

How do we divert some/all of the Trump 'Mexican Wall' money into something vastly more useful such as s@h? ;-) ;-) ;-)



Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Martin, you should spend more time reading other threads instead of banging on about in the Win10 thread and you would've seen this, Fast Radio Bursts, a couple of days ago.

It's called being late to the party. ;-)

Cheers.

CHIME is a "broad sweep" telescope, not a point in the sky one thus may not be suitable for us.
However, it does look as if the data analysis might benefit from the use of distributed computing to analyse its vast amount of data, but not looking for ET.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Martin, you should spend more time reading other threads instead of banging on about in the Win10 thread and you would've seen this, Fast Radio Bursts, a couple of days ago.

It's called being late to the party. ;-).

Good catch Wiggo, and indeed so! :-P

Good sleuthing there by Tullio, good to see he is still star gazing! :-)


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

CHIME is a "broad sweep" telescope, not a point in the sky one thus may not be suitable for us.
However, it does look as if the data analysis might benefit from the use of distributed computing to analyse its vast amount of data, but not looking for ET.

My reading is that CHIME is a phased array search "software defined" telescope. Hence, in effect, you have for example a "fly's-eye" type view of the heavens across a broad frequency spectrum.


For our present s@h, we have an opportunistic piggy-back on steerable telescopes (Arecibo, Greenbank, Parkes) whereby there is a lot of complication added in that we have no control over how those telescopes track or sweep across the skies. There is also huge complication in filtering out RFI...

In contrast, CHIME with a clean steady sweep across the skies may well give us a much cleaner input of data...


One to follow up?...

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

All radio telescopes suffer from RFI - it's a "fact of life" :-(
Given CHIME is a sweep not point, it can only say there is an interesting signal somewhere in that region of sky (which is pretty much horizon to horizon along the North/South axis, but quite narrow on the East/West axis one would then have to do some more localisation searches to narrow down the location better - and that would involve the use of fully steerable telescopes like the GBT or the Lovell (both of which can cover a similar latitude range as CHIME - Arecibo & Parkes are too far South to be of any use)

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The Sardina 64 meter steerable telescope has an adaptive optics. I have read in the Technosignature paper that it has been used for some SETI search but I don't think it has given data to SETI@home. I have seen very recent data from Arecibo on my Windows 10 screensavers. Also on "Nature" magazine I have read a very interesting paper on the fight done to bring Arecibo back to works after the Maria disaster.
Tullio

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