EXOPLANET
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TIME AND SPACE
“ CAN YOU BUILD ME A HYPERBOLIC TI ME CHAMBER? ” Almost 110 years ago our view of time was changed forever. Time wasn’t part of the immutable stage of life but it was an active player. We finally understood how to squeeze time and how to stretch it thanks to a German patent officer named Albert Einstein. Einstein’s most famous thought experiment regarding time dilation is the Twin paradox. We have two twins, one goes into a spaceship that moves near the speed of light for a few hours and when he comes back to Earth, years have passed and his twin has aged significantly. Where t is the proper time (in the twin paradox the time that passes on Earth) while t 0 is the time for the moving observer. Now let’s talk about the hyperbolic time chamber . In the Manga and Anime Dragon Ball Z there’s a special room where you can spend a year in there and only one day would have passed on Earth. My friend wants me to build him that, so let’s substitute our values in and see what
Extent of human radio broadcast
ASSUMING THAT THERE ARE OTHER INTELLIGENT CIVILISATIONS OUT THERE IN THE UNIVERSE, WHAT IS THE LIKELIHOOD THAT WE’LL EVER BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE? The key to answer this question is to look at the Drake Equation. Where N is the number of civilisations in our galaxy with which radio-communication might be possible (i.e. planets past our light cone); The DE tells you the necessary informations we need to estimate an answer for. The probability we communicate with another civilisation depends on the number of stars in our galaxy (represented by the average star-formation rate R * ), the fraction of stars with planets (f p ), the average number of planets in the Goldilock zone (n e ), the fraction of planets that develop life (f l ), the fraction of planets with life that develop an intelligent life form(f i ), the fraction of them with ability to communicate using technology (f c ) and finally the length of time this civilisation release signal into space (L). These
Space Roar : Silent Scream
The cosmos has plenty of terrifying Lovecraftian features, but one of my favorites is the Space Roar. There is a loud radio signal, described as a constant hiss, that seems to pervade the cosmos. It is louder than the radio signature of radio galaxies, and it is without explanation. It was discovered in 2009 by the team using the ARCADE experiment. The Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission is a great experiment which was design to detect the radio waves emitted by very distant galaxies. Our atmosphere is opaque to radio waves. This is why we can transmit signals to the other side of the planet. Radio waves bounce on the atmosphere when we produce them and off it when coming from space. To circumvent this situation, ARCADE was placed on a high altitude balloon, which took the instrument to 37 km, enough to be able to detect the right radio waves. I’m the Universe, hear me roar. The specific radio waves the experiment w