Hope it’s here to put us out of our misery.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
56 points (95.2% liked)
Interesting Shares
1865 readers
78 users here now
Fascinating articles, captivating images, satisfying videos, interesting projects, stunning research and more.
Share something you find incredibly interesting.
Prefix must be included in the title!
Mandatory prefixes for posts
It helps to see at glance what post is about and certain clients also offer filters that make prefixes searchable/filterable.
Note: Photon (m.lemmy.zip) frontend used for links above.
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
TLDR: they don't know.
Wonder if this could be used as a way to synchronize time and what the caveats of that would be. Aside from detecting these signals reliably, couldn't we have something like a relay setup alongside GPS where we could leverage LPT's for keeping the most accurate time? Maybe that's too much or what we already have in place is simply easier and more reliable.
That assumes this is a permanent feature of the object and not episodic or something. It could be that this only happens for a decade every 100,000,000 years, and we just happened to catch it when it reached us. Or it could be aliens.
This next bit is my understanding of things and may not be entirely accurate:
But we use quartz crystal vibrations for time increments, because that doesn’t vary much, and there’s a specific clock used as the baseline I believe (similar to the international weight standards). Quartz crystal vibration is both well understood, and rapid enough to use as sub-seconds, making it far more accurate than something going every 44 minutes.
GPS is a largely standalone thing that triangulates your position with multiple satellites, and while it does use time for determining position (based on ping time or something similar), it only needs to be relative to the other satellites, IIUC. But it’s also in such rapid increments that 44 minutes wouldn’t be terribly helpful.
So I don’t think it would be worth doing since our present system is good enough, and the signal might stop as soon as we build the new infrastructure. Much better to use something we have control over, and understand better, if it’s going to be used directly in daily life on earth.
GPS broadcasts current UTC from their onboard atomic clocks.
Iirc on the voyager satellite we use the location of a pulsar as a reference to find earth, because it has a recognizable radiation pattern that any alien can find