Trevor Collins
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
Now, some researchers argue that if other dishes like one that's called the Very Large Array, it's in New Mexico.
It is the quintessential 27 like white satellite dishes out in the desert.
You've probably seen this in Independence Day.
You've probably seen this in movies like Contact.
When you have movies about hearing about extraterrestrial life, you're likely seeing the very large array.
That's the name of it, which is such a science.
Some scientists named that.