Archives 2024

Even with my general (and limited) understanding of biology, that unless it’s forbidden by the laws of physics, nature generally does anything and everything you can imagine… This one blew my mind.

And not just once, with creatures having eyes on their shells, but with the number of times eyes have evolved within just that genus (remember: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), and also the correlation between nerve holes in the shell and eye complexity.

Researchers Solve Mystery of The Sea Creature That Evolved Eyes All Over Its Shell

It’s amazing how something can make total sense while being hard to wrap your brain around it at the same time!

It is a sad day indeed to share the news of William (Jack) Welch’s passing. I won’t duplicate here his achievements and awards, list his papers, nor attempt to wax poetic about his outsized contributions to the fields of radio astronomy and SETI. That’s all here and here.

What I’d like to add is that he was a wonderful person. As you can see from the picture below, he always had a smile, kindness, warmth, fun, and positive energy to share. He had the soul of an explorer, realistic yet indefatigable.

We’ll miss you, Jack.

Won’t you come, and wash the rain away? For those in California and around the world laboring under a deluge from the sky, perhaps this video from the frontiers of astroseismology will be entertaining and informative, if not comforting.

The short version is that it’s not implausible for a microscopic black hole to enter the sun, start consuming material and producing back-pressure against the massive gravity. As you can imagine, its growth eventually alters the life cycle of the star, but perhaps more subtly than you’d think.

And, back in the context of SETI and general cosmology, while we’re pretty sure our Sun doesn’t (yet) have one, it is encouraging to think that we can place constraints on the number of primordial black holes there are flying around out there, as well as confirm or rule out some dark matter theories.

Some of my favorite moments in science are when we find something that we didn’t think was possible. I also think that’s a good way to describe a SETI experiment: an non-nature detector, sifting through the universe looking for something we don’t think nature does.

Today’s instance is an invisible pulsar companion with a mass much larger than a typical neutron star, perhaps the largest on record, and in the range where it’s expected to collapse into a black hole, essentially at or above the “TOV limit.” I’ll let Science News explain.

For those who enjoy these types of mysteries, I also recommend the so-called OMG Particle in the field of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which broke the “GZK limit.”

Every year, now for the past 3 years, there’s a giant wind/ice storm that knocks power and connectivity out at the summit of Haleakala. This year, it started over a week ago, and we’ve just regained connectivity to the instruments. Hooray!

Fingers crossed we’re done for this year and that the infrastructure improvements they’re doing make next year even shorter or a non-event.

We were actually observing when the power went out, but our multiple levels of safeguards obviously did their job. As you can see, the cameras are in fine working order.

It sure would be nice if the moon weren’t so bright, though! Even outside of the field of view, the two bright semi-circles in the bottom half of the images are scattered light from it.

Making our next 10 instruments efficiently, as well as ensuring their reliability and ease of maintenance, is a top priority. Some of you might remember a previous iteration of a power board, an attempt to reduce wiring and build effort that encompassed all power wiring in the instrument and attempted to eliminate a COTS (commercial off the shelf) component. That board, however, was overpriced and unnecessarily aggressive, so we switched vendors, changed how we did the cabling to avoid joints, and reduced the scope of the board to handling the two remaining wiring challenges: the fans and FLI cameras.

The result is above and below, and is 40x cheaper than before, while still eliminating all of the manual labor, difficulty when swapping out components, and long-term reliability risk! Fans plug into 4-pin headers, and FLI cables will screw into block terminals (not rendered below) in the bottom right. No soldering, everything labelled, quicker and better than could be done by hand.

We hope you enjoy these peeks into the details behind LaserSETI, but stay tuned for some bigger updates and announcements soon!