Let’s say you’re traveling at warp speeds and you need to avoid hitting any kind of mass along your path? How do you navigate and know where you are? Can you rely on our flimsy earth-made global positioning satellites that are in danger of failing within the next couple of years? Nope, you sure can’t.
Then what you’ll need is something similar. Instead of listening to signals from these satellites you look for pulsars that emit regular radio signals; just like our satellites.
That’s what Bertolomé Coll at the Observatoire de Paris in France found: Four pulsars within our galaxy (specifically: 0751+1807 (3.5ms), 2322+2057 (4.8ms), 0711-6830 (5.5ms) and 1518+0205B (7.9ms)) that form a tetrahedron around our solar system that can help us locate the position of any point down to a meter. You may call it an interstellar GPS system.
Why four pulsars? Coll points out that on these scales relativity has to be taken into account when processing the signals and to do this, the protocol has to specify a position in space-time, which requires four signals.
Coll then defines the origin for this system of co-ordinates as 00:00 on 1 January 2001 at the focal point of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, the radio telescope near Cambridge in the UK that first observed pulsars.
No comments:
Post a Comment