Lawblog: August 2009

First Results From the Allen Telescope Array: "

There's no word from ET (yet), but the array has provided some useful data that could help solve one the great mysteries about star formation.

The Allen
Telescope Array, located a few hundred miles north of San Francisco, is one of
the world's most unusual and innovative radio telescopes. The facility began
operating in 2007 with an array of 42 dishes. When completed, it will consist
of 350 dishes, each six meters in diameter. This design provides the array with
a huge angle of view of 2.5 degrees, some 17 times larger than its nearest
rival. It is also able to monitor simultaneously an unprecedented range of
radio frequencies from 0.5 to 11.2 gigahertz.

The facility is a
joint operation between the SETI Institute in Mountain View and the University
of California, Berkeley, which determines where to point the array. Its large
angle of view means that wherever the array is pointed, several stars of
interest to the SETI Institute can be studied.

Today, the team posted
an interesting update of its first results and progress towards its various
scientific goals.

The highlight is images
of the movement of atomic hydrogen clouds in the intergalactic space between
nearby galaxies, which could help solve one of the big mysteries of star
formation.

Many galaxies do
not appear to contain enough gas to sustain star formation in the way
astronomers expect. That's a puzzle, but atomic hydrogen may be the solution.
Astronomers do not include levels of atomic hydrogen gas in their calculations,
because the gas is found largely in intergalactic regions where star formation
does not take place.

The Allen array
team is looking for evidence that atomic hydrogen clouds are drawn into star-forming
regions of galaxies where they contribute to stellar formation.

That's
interesting stuff and it may yield fascinating results in the near future.

But no word yet
on any broadcasts from ET.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0908.1175: The Allen Telescope Array: The First Widefield, Panchromatic, Snapshot Radio Camera