(Caption: LOFAR consists of 20,000 individual radio antennas spread across Europe)
So what is going on there? Did they build a moat to protect some but not all the telescopes, or did they build the telescopes where there was already a moat, for reasons?
Spoiler Also :
If we were going for that sort of solution, I would be more for it 'cos of the cool factor, if not the economics.
So it appears we do not need the hundreds of little space ships at all, we can do it with a telescope:Finding the "Planet 9" black hole with a fleet of spaceships
A fleet of tiny spacecraft could prove the existence of a primordial black hole in the outer solar system – according to two independent proposals. The primordial black hole could be playing the gravitational role of “Planet Nine”, which is a hypothetical world that could explain the unusual orbits of certain Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the outer Solar System.Physicsworld arXiv preprint 1 and preprint 2
Orbits of these KBOs suggest that a body a few times more massive than the Earth currently resides about 500 AU from the Sun towards the constellation Orion. Searches for Planet Nine have come up empty – but this is no surprise because at that distance, even a large and reflective planet would be barely detectable with the kind of wide-field-of-view telescopes used for large-area surveys.
His proposal is a more modest version of the Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to send ultralight (about 1 g) probes on a 20-year journey to the nearby star Alpha Centauri using an earthbound laser array to boost the spacecraft to 20% of the speed of light (0.2c). Using a similar system, Witten reckons a 10-year journey to 500 AU could be achieved at 0.001c with much larger spacecraft (about 100 g) – necessitating a less daunting feat of miniaturization. This is still 20 times the speed of NASA’s New Horizons Pluto probe.
By scattering a host of such probes in the general direction of the hypothetical black hole, a lucky few might pass within tens of AU of the object, accelerating slightly as they did so. If the probes send regular, timed signals back to Earth, the gravitational field of the black hole would cause a lengthening of the interval between pulses.
Witten calculates that to detect the black hole using this scheme, the probes’ timing measurements would need to be accurate to about 10^-5 s over the course of a year. This is well within the abilities of existing atomic clocks, but it is hard to imagine how such devices could be squeezed into 100 g spacecraft.
Gravitational pull: the six most distant known objects in the Solar System with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Also, when viewed in 3D, they tilt nearly identically away from the plane of the Solar System. Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown have shown that a planet with 10 times the mass of the Earth in a distant eccentric orbit anti-aligned with the other six objects (orange) is required to maintain this configuration.
Sadly, we're having a rainy summer here - lots of cloudy nights, not to mention there are trees and buildings in the way.There is currently a comet visible to the naked eye:
It was discovered in March and reached its perihelion - the closest point in its orbit to the sun - on July 3.
The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on July 23, passing the planet at a distance of 103 million km - about 400 times further away than the moon.
Astronomers say it will be challenging to see, however, thanks to its low altitude and the long daylight hours of summer.
It will be visible both before sunrise and after sunset from mid-northern latitudes, but will never climb very high in the sky - meaning it could be obscured by trees, hills and buildings from many people's vantage points.
The brightness of the July sky means it could also appear quite faint.
According to the BBC's Sky at Night magazine, the best time to look for Comet Neowise will be on or after July 7 when it will be visible in the morning and evening.
It is currently moving slowly westwards through the constellation of Auriga, where it can be seen to the lower left of the bright star Capella.
Its path will take it into the constellation of Lynx by mid-July, when it will be visible all through the night but remaining low in the sky in the north.
It will move into Ursa Major on July 17 before passing beneath the stars of the Big Dipper towards the end of the month, and into Coma Berenices.
Or it's more likely just a comet with no relation whatsover, as there are many, many comets with periods in the thousands and even tens of thousands of years.
Planets don't twinkle. Comets look a bit fuzzy to the naked eye. If what you saw didn't look fuzzy, it was probably Jupiter or Saturn.
The point I had not got before is that if we can find a black hole near us, it indicates that there are a lot of them, and they may be a significant component of dark matter. I cannot be sure exactly what the top of the confidence interval means in years, I think it is 10^1.4 years, or ~ 25 years, so it is a while until we have a negative result.
I can't see any comets in the bottom picture. The one in the top picture is probably Jupiter, as it's normally very bright. It's one of the few things I can see here (too much light pollution).It was fuzzy - like a very faint corona?
I saw Saturn and Jupiter close together in the east - i did think that might be it so I looked it up but the comment wasn't showing on my app.
Planets:Spoiler :
Comet?: (to the left of the center)
Spoiler :
Yes and no. While the Indians will have a stake in the company, the UK can and likely would firewall off any satellite navigation projects from the Indians. This is pretty standard for space projects with national security implications being performed by companies with multinational ownership.
