I hadn't read about the CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) telescope before.
From the wikipedia article:
> The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster.
that's super interesting. My limited exposure to radio astronomy relies on a lot more custom collection hardware (super cooled LNAs, with hydrogen maser clocks, ...) and mostly pure software processing. Seeing this very COTS hardware with careful processing systems is neat.
Bitcoin's efficiency is not relevant to the discussion. Every other comment about energy consumption pulls replies with complaints about Bitcoin mining. It brings nothing new, it distracts from the topic, generally lowers the quality of the discussion. Don't do it. If you must vent, do it where it's on topic.
Why start this discussion. It's slightly expediting the heat death of the universe for no reason. Are you trying to eliminate all order in the universe???
I completely agree. I think it makes sense when they have 256 processing nodes with GPUs plus everything else, just the number caught me off guard at first.
I work on a plasma confinement device that has a linear regulator in its 100 kV gyrotron power supply that uses 6 kW just to keep the filament warm. The coils use 10 MW during a shot. And this is considered a small machine.
We use 18 DC train motors with 1-ton flywheels on them. Currently they spin up to 1650 RPM then get turned into generators. It takes about a second to spin up the very inductive copper coils to the desired current then the shot lasts 100 ms. After the shot the motors are spinning at 1200 RPM and it takes 5 minutes to get back up to 1650 RPM.
Well the pay is about half the market rate and I'm leaving soon because my SO's research group is moving across the country. I suppose I'll just go work for industry and be able to pay off student loans/own a house in my life.
Science could hold on to talent if only there was a budget for it.
Multi-messenger observations will eventually solve this, e.g. a correlation with LIGO, if the sensitivity is good enough and they're 'low mass' collisions.
The energy needed for these signals already narrows down the category of objects it could be. As the article says, neutron star collisions and mergers, magnetars, and of course black holes.
> Now CHIME has reversed that trend, he says, “I don’t think theorists will catch up with us.”
Funny stuff. I like to imagine they're virtual galaxies resulting from perturbation theory of gravity field theory. With ordinary galaxies described in terms of exchanges of virtual galaxies. Of course, they wouldn't necessarily carry the same mass as the corresponding real galaxies.
> Curiously, because the luminosity of a typical quasar is not dissimilar to the peak luminosity of an FRB, we cannot yet completely discount the involvement of supermassive black holes. But Marcote and colleagues’ results argue against that possibility, and the timescales for quasar variability are more likely to be days to months than milliseconds.
I agree. As a child I thought these would be extremely rare. In my naive little kid brain I guess I figured there must be only a handful of them known to exist, and I had endless ideas about how such a rare and unique celestial entity must have alien origins. Haha.
I’m USA born, have lived here my entire life, and have known what “being in a tizzy” meant since… 4th or 5th grade? I thought it was a relatively common word/phrase. I do read books though, but nothing fancy. Our literacy standards are apparently spiraling downward.
I just remember telling teachers to not be in such a tizzy when I was quite young, certainly before middle school. Generally their state was my fault; I was far from a model student.
It's fine to not know it. It's absurd to judge the merits of an article based on not knowing a word it uses. I mean seriously - you're going to judge an article based on a word YOU happen to not know? Farcical to the extreme.
Made me feel like I'm in that movie from the 90s, "Dexter's Lab Ego Trip" when they are using square wheels instead of circles.
From the wikipedia article:
> The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster.
that's super interesting. My limited exposure to radio astronomy relies on a lot more custom collection hardware (super cooled LNAs, with hydrogen maser clocks, ...) and mostly pure software processing. Seeing this very COTS hardware with careful processing systems is neat.
> The telescope consumes 250 kilowatts of power.
woah.