I am generally well read across a wide variety of fields, but now and again I come across a sentence or paragraph where the sheer density of information packed into a small number of well-chosen field-specific terms just stops me in my tracks. The abstract for this paper is a testament to the ability of jargon to increase the information carrying capacity of the limited bitrate of human language - it hit my head like a zip bomb.
Astronomers processed a bunch of data from a fairly new antenna array (CHIME) and saw a giant burst of energy in radio range (above 20khz), localized to a 10 light year “bubble” of space, that is relatively close to us, as a novel measurement precision
James Webb then also correlated an IR signal near this radio signal
So it seems to me that we’re finally just seeing for the first time the actual data that is coming into earth, a lot of the analysis seems to think this is a new thing but in fact it’s simply just new for us to be able to measure
CHIME nor these methods existed previously to the last 5 years so we’re likely going to see a lot of what we just haven’t been seeing.
It doesn’t mean it’s new it just means astronomers are getting better tools to continue to refine the granularity of measurements
Every day Hacker News titles, stories, and comments have acronyms and abbreviations I've never seen before, and I have to search for the term to know what it's talking about. I know what a parsec is, but I've never actually seen the pc abbreviation used before. At least I learn something new every day.
I am generally well read across a wide variety of fields, but now and again I come across a sentence or paragraph where the sheer density of information packed into a small number of well-chosen field-specific terms just stops me in my tracks. The abstract for this paper is a testament to the ability of jargon to increase the information carrying capacity of the limited bitrate of human language - it hit my head like a zip bomb.
It gives me flashbacks to the last time I tried to figure out what a sheaf was.
Is kJy as a brightness unit the abomination I think it is?
You nerd sniped me :) In this context, I believe it is a kilo-Jansky, not a kilo-Joule * year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jansky
My interpretation of the paper:
Astronomers processed a bunch of data from a fairly new antenna array (CHIME) and saw a giant burst of energy in radio range (above 20khz), localized to a 10 light year “bubble” of space, that is relatively close to us, as a novel measurement precision
James Webb then also correlated an IR signal near this radio signal
So it seems to me that we’re finally just seeing for the first time the actual data that is coming into earth, a lot of the analysis seems to think this is a new thing but in fact it’s simply just new for us to be able to measure
CHIME nor these methods existed previously to the last 5 years so we’re likely going to see a lot of what we just haven’t been seeing.
It doesn’t mean it’s new it just means astronomers are getting better tools to continue to refine the granularity of measurements
Every day Hacker News titles, stories, and comments have acronyms and abbreviations I've never seen before, and I have to search for the term to know what it's talking about. I know what a parsec is, but I've never actually seen the pc abbreviation used before. At least I learn something new every day.
You didn't mention but I guess pc here stands for parsecs