This Intergalactic Telephone Can be Powered by the Sun [Communications]

Within the far future, humans might communicate across great interstellar distances-light years, in actuality-using a big intergalactic communications array powered by the Sun.

Such an array would ” live” about 550 astronomical units from the Sun at some degree in space where light rays bent by gravitational lensing converge. At this point, the array would serve as a magnifier for any signal we’d desire to send to faraway worlds or systems (Alpha Centauri, perhaps).

This magnification effect can be especially important to future human space exploration missions that happen to travel beyond our solar system. Beyond Voyager-type distances, 10 billion kilometers or more, radio signals become garbled or lost as a result of the cosmic microwave background radiation that we believe is an echo from the birth of the Universe.

Indeed, many scientists today believe among the major reasons we’ve yet to hear from alien life could be because this background ” noise” is drowning everything out. This array would help address that ” deafness” and boost (or intercept) signals.

The tricky part stands out as the receiving array. Not only would we’ve to position a lens at 550 AU from our Sun, we’d ought to do a similar inside the system we’re attempting to speak to in addition. For our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, that might be 4.37 light-years away, and then 749 AU from Alpha Centauri itself in that system’s sweet spot.

That’s amazing, currently unfathomable distance, for sure, but if one gets past that minor detail, the technology driving the array is really quite spartan, reports Space.com:

With these relays in place, the error rate between the two points would drop from 1-in-2 to one-in-2 million on par with the accuracy achieved by the DSN in our local solar environment.

Shockingly little transmitting power is needed, too: only 1 -tenth of a milliwatt, or several orders of magnitude lower than the DSN’s antennas, Maccone found.

Distance is the foremost hurdle people reflect on by way of hypothesizing about human space travel outside the solar system. Communications, however, might be equally daunting. A system like this one, while still bound by the laws of physics and the velocity of light, would at the least ensure the messages are crystal clear after they hit astronauts’ ears 4.37 years after initial transmission. [ MSNBC ]

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This post is tagged: cosmic microwave background, human space exploration, interstellar distances, microwave background radiation, space exploration missions