The news for the year in the cosmos has a name and surname: 2024 YR4, that asteroid whose probabilities of impact on Earth do nothing but up. But thousands of kilometers from our planet continue to happen fascinating events. Without going very far, X -ray telescopes have just revealed A superstructure of more than one billion light years. There are more, because for five years astronomers had been looking for a response to a television signal that came from space. The enigma has just been resolved.
The mystery of the signals. For five years, astronomers who analyzed the data of the Murchison Widefield Array radio in Western Australia found an unexpected enigma: A television signal from heaven. Since the telescope is located in A radioelectric silence zone Designated to avoid human interference in radioastronomy, the detection of said signal was particularly disconcerting for the community.
Even more strange was the fact that the signal It seemed to move through the skywhich led to all kinds of speculation about possible reflections of our own transmissions until, of course, theories about extraterrestrial activity.
The answer, as almost always, It was something simpler.
The discovery: airplanes. Apparently, the turning point came when Jonathan Poly, physicist at Brown University and leader of the United States research team, He had a revelation: “We said: ‘I bet the signal is being reflected in a plane'”. While this hypothesis had already raised before, no one had confirmed it with certainty.
To check it, the equipment used advanced signal processing techniques, as close field corrections and beam formationwith which they managed to better focus close sources of interference. What happened? That the analysis revealed that The reflected signal corresponded to the Channel 7 frequency bandan Australian digital television station.
Perhaps more important than that, the calculations on the altitude and speed of the reflective object indicated that It was a plane in full phase of cruiseflying at 11.7 kilometers of altitude at a speed of 792 km/h, data that coincide with the usual characteristics of a commercial flight.
A problem for astronomy. As indicated in your recently published studythis type of interference represents a serious problem for astronomers, since Contamin the data and can force the elimination of large amounts of valuable information. According to Jade Chucharmefrom Brown University, “It’s like trying to listen to a friend whispering on the other side of the table while a child screams in your ear.”
In this way, every time a television signal is reflected in a plane, It overlaps cosmic waves That astronomers seek to analyze, which can make large sets of observations must be ruled out. Not just that. As they underline, the team’s discovery is key to Develop interference elimination methodswhich will allow filtering these reflexes without losing important astronomical information. However, the problem is not limited to airplanes: satellites in orbit represent an even greater threat.
Are we too loud on earth for astronomy? It is the big question that slides from the finding. The number of satellites in orbit It is still increasingwhich aggravates the problem of radio interference. Although scientists are improving data filtering techniques, some begin to question whether planet Earth himself remains adequate place for radioastronomy. According to poor“If we cannot find a silent sky on earth, maybe the earth is no longer the indicated place.”
Be that as it may, some astronomers have begun to consider The possibility of moving radioastronomy to spacewith projects that propose the installation of telescopes in the hidden face of the moon, where the terrestrial interference would be minimal. In that sense, the discovery of Poly and his team not only solves a five -year mystery, but also marks a crucial step for the preservation of radioastronomy in an era where electromagnetic pollution is a growing problem. With the advancement of technology, the struggle between the exploration of the cosmos and the signs generated by the human being could define the future of astronomy.
Unfortunately for believers, no one was watching TV in space.
In Xataka | The impact probability of asteroid 2024 YR4 has risen to 3.1% (1 of 32): why the UN waiting for May to act
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