Trevor Collins

Stop me if I start to sound like a mad scientist.

I tried my best to distill a lot of this into the sippy cup of knowledge.

So I hope the juice is fresh, okay?

Yeah, yeah.

They're doing those mental reps, putting in the work so us, you know, common folk can use a smartphone that bounces beams off of space dishes, you know?

And then I can text a meme to you, you know what I mean?

Yep, yep.

Or talk about thick aliens.

Okay, so if you look up at the night sky and you look at a star, commonly you hear twinkle, twinkle little star, right?

And you see the oscillations through the atmosphere.

You're seeing kind of like the different densities of the atmosphere from heat,

Well, similar to how a star can twinkle when you're looking at it, interstellar scintillation refers to a similar twinkling that occurs with radio waves.

So again, we're still talking about the electromagnetic spectrum, we're just talking about a part that we can't see, but it also twinkles in a sense.

In fact, scintillate literally means to emit sparks or sparkle.

So this happens as emitted radio waves are refracted from variations in density as they travel through space.

Because yes, space is a near vacuum.

There are different spots in space that have different densities, et cetera, et cetera, gaseous clouds and what have you.

But

All of this and gravitational lensing moving near black holes, large stellar, large mass objects.

All of this can change how radio waves move and make it to us.