The year is 2010 and the Lovell Radio Telescope - the flagship of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics in
Manchester, UK- picks up a signal that’s not a pulsar, but instead, finally, is a true signal from a civilization in a remote edge of the Milky Way.
If Stuart Lowe -a member of the ESA’s Planck spacecraft’s Core Team who runs a
radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank- has his way the world will know of the discovery in realtime along with the Jodrell Bank team. The Jodrell Bank runs an array of seven radio telescopes distributed across the UK with a
resolution greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Lowe is creating a totally cool service called AstroTwitter
to generate a Twitter feed associated with a telescope that announces
in real time what it is looking at. Lowe wants to create a mashup that
displays the telescope’s target in apps such as Google Sky or
Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope.
The success of the Twitter feed from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is leading to an explosion of new web-based scientific communications.
AstroTwitter could also feed AstroGrid, the doorway to Virtual Observatory, which provide a suite of desktop applications to enable astronomers to explore and bookmark resources from around the world, find data, store and share files in VOSpace, query databases, plot and manipulate tables, cross-match cataloges, and build and run scripts to automate sequences of tasks.
Posted by Jason McManus.
Image Credit: Alan Clark, Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, England, was turned into a giant projection screen for a light show to celebrate 50 years since sputnik, and also the 50th birthday of the telescope.
Sources:
http://twitter.com/jodrellbank
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23
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