Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists.

Singleton said the polarization synchrotron basically abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. This may be what happens in pulsars, as well.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

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http://www.universetoday.com/2009/06/30/device-makes-radio-waves-travel-faster-than-light/

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Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.

"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.

The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in astronomical terms. Since then it has done very little except baffle astrophysicists.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18775-mysterious-radio-waves-emitted-from-nearby-galaxy.html?DCMP

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astronomy

Shaken, not stirred?

Last winter I showed off the SCORE setup at the monthly meeting of my astronomy club. Bob Naeye, Editor in Chief of Sky and Telescope, was at the meeting and took special interest in the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston’s cooperative participation with the MIT Planetary Astronomy Lab’s research on Kuiper Belt Objects. Bob later contacted me to ask more about the equipment that I put together for asteroid occultation timing, so I pointed him to my article on SCORE and sent him a photograph. Yesterday I received an advance copy of July’s Sky & Telescope, which features a prominent mention of the MIT/ ATMoB connection and a photograph of me with SCORE as I prepared for the 20000 Varuna occultation event in Brazil.

From Bob Naeye’s July Sky & Telescope Spectrum column,

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News article in the Diario Norteste

March 2nd, 2010 This article was translated from Portuguese to English by Google, hence it isn’t ‘perfect’ English. To translate to another language, use the dropdown selection on the upper right of this page.Diário do Nordeste

FENÔMENO ASTRONÔMICO (19/2/2010)

Ceará é ponto de observação

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Self-Contained Occultation REcorder (SCORE)

Comments (3) Article tags: BlackBox, Canon, GPS, IOTA, occultation, PC164, SCORE, Video Amp 3 Responses to “Self-Contained Occultation REcorder (SCORE)”

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I finally have a reason to buy an iPad!

I finally have a reason to buy an iPad!

I am one of those people who made a point of stopping by an Apple Store just days after the iPad went on sale. I didn’t go there to buy one because I knew that I wouldn’t be happy with anything less than a 3G model, and that won’t be available until next month, and also because I’m ‘economically challenged’ since leaving my last job. But as my readers and friends know I’m a gadget guy, a Tech Geek if you will, and the iPad has geek written all over it. Of course I wanted to play with one, and to find some logical or illogical reason to dip into my dwindling savings in order to add this tech wonder to my geek arsenal.




I couldn’t justify buying an iPad until last Saturday, while attending the annual North East Astronomy Forum (NEAF).

Asteroids

There is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the stars above us that make astronomy so much fun. The truth is the universe is a constantly changing, moving, some would say “living” thing because you just never know what you are going to see on any given night of stargazing.

But of the many celestial phenomenons, there is probably none as exciting as that time you see your first asteroid on the move in the heavens. To call asteroids the “rock stars” of astronomy is simultaneously a bad joke but an accurate depiction of how astronomy fans view them. Unlike suns, planets and moons, asteroids are on the move, ever changing and, if they appear in the night sky, exciting and dynamic.

Like rock stars, asteroids have been given their fair share of urban myth and lore. Many have attributed the extinction of the dinosaurs to the impact of a huge asteroid on the earth. This theory has some credibility and, if it is true, it evokes some pretty startling images and foreboding fears in the current reining species on earth, the human race.

The fact that asteroids are fast moving space debris only makes their movement and activity more interesting and exciting. Unlike a moon, planet or star, the odds that an asteroid could hit the earth are entirely reasonable and in fact, there are many documented cases of small asteroids making it through our atmosphere and leaving some pretty impressive craters in the earth’s surface.

Popular culture has happily embraced the idea of an asteroid impact. The idea has spawned many a science fiction story adding the idea that alien life forms may ride asteroids to our world and start a “war of the worlds” situation. But by far, the most talked about concept that has captured the imagination and the fears of science fiction fans and the general public is of another asteroid hitting the earth that could wipe out life as allegedly happened to the dinosaurs. In fact, the movie “Armageddon” was based on this idea and the concept that somehow mankind could avert that catastrophe with technology.

But probably the best way to calm our fears and replace science fiction with science is with understanding and knowledge. The truth is, there has been a lot of study of asteroid activity and the serious scientific community has gained significant knowledge of these amazing celestial bodies. A number of probes to asteroids have been conducted which have given us a wealth of information about their composition and how we might predict their behavior.

We now know that the majority of asteroids we get to witness come from an asteroid belt that exists between Mars and Jupiter. It is from this community of asteroids that many of the notable asteroids emerged. Scientists have gained significant knowledge about the composition of asteroids and separated them into classes including class S which comes of the part of the belt that is closest to Mars, classes C, D and V which are classified by composition and a class called “Centaurs” whose flight patterns take them closer to Jupiter and Uranus.

Some of the probes NASA has conducted on near flying asteroids have performed some pretty amazing studies of these eccentric celestial bodies. In 1994 the Galileo probe got within 1000 miles of the asteroid Ida and discovered that Ida actually had its own moon.



Other probes have fired impactors into asteroids and even landed on an asteroid to produce some amazing scientific data for us. There is much to learn about asteroids in our love of astronomy and that knowledge only makes our enjoyment of seeing them in the cosmos even more exciting.