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posted by martyb on Thursday March 08 2018, @10:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Kessler-syndrome dept.

An arXiv preprint suggests that evidence of intelligent (or trashy) life could be found by looking for space junk:

Its author, Héctor Socas-Navarro, spends most of his time at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics in Spain studying the sun. But he was struck by a weird side effect of the ring of active and retired satellites circling Earth: it's a little bit opaque. And the more satellites we throw up there, the more opaque it gets. He realized that if we—or any technologically advanced aliens out there—build enough satellites, they'll eventually become dense enough to leave a faint shadow around the planet when it passes in front of a star.

And that's awfully convenient given that one of the best ways we have of spotting alien planets is by staring at their stars and waiting for tiny dips in brightness as planets pass in front of them. Essentially, Socas-Navarro's new paper proposes, if aliens have put enough satellites into orbit around their planet, we'll be able to spot the faintly opaque bubble before and after we spot the brightness dip of the planet itself.

The scale of the endeavor would be a real challenge for the aliens, however, since this idea relies on between 10 billion and one trillion satellites. "It's like building the pyramids," Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, told New Scientist. "Each building block is easy, but putting it together is the hard engineering task."


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday March 09 2018, @10:29PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday March 09 2018, @10:29PM (#650272) Journal

    If the signal's too weak to read, you need a larger or more sensitive detector.

    Or, if you can keep the sensor noise down, more time.

    They're pushing photon counting [gigajot.tech] now, so there's that to look forward to. Once you're down to counting actual photons, as opposed to random electrons wobbling off the sides of a collection well, all you need are counters. Given enough time, signal will emerge from the noise. Noise is random; it averages out. Signal is not, and does not. As long as there is some signal. And generally speaking, in cases like this, there is.

    You can get astonishingly good astro images using nothing but a DSLR with multiple exposures and image stacking+post-shooting-alignment to push the noise down. I do a bit of that myself. Magnitude 10 and even dimmer objects are easily captured at reasonable ISOs with the most mundane equipment.

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