Many radio telescope dishes in a dry savannah, going off to the horizon. This is the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa. Photograph from here: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/03/business/south-africa-meerkat-telescope/index.html

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   John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 05:43:13 JST John Carlos Baez

   When I was a kid, under the influence of science fiction, I dreamt I was going to the moon. It was so exciting! When I woke up I was crushed. When I grew up, I realized sending humans into space is a waste of money at present - though it was good to prove we could do it.

   If we're serious about exploring airless environments with lots of radiation, we should be developing cyborgs and better AI. But meanwhile, we can explore space from the comfort of home using space probes and telescopes. We just need to get better at explaining to ordinary folks how cool this is. I can get thrilled by graphs and tables of data, because I can vividly imagine what they mean. Most folks would prefer a good animated video.

   MeerKAT is an amazing array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa. They want to expand this to the Square Kilometer Array, which will actually consist of thousands of telescopes in South Africa and Australia. But it's already seeing great stuff. Like just this June they found a weird thing that flashes like a pulsar - but really slowly, once every 54 minutes instead of a thousand times a second like an ordinary pulsar.

   That's insane! What is this thing? We don't know, and that's exactly why it's cool. But for some guesses, read on - after I do the laundry.

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