1580 is much more than 2.5, and even there are only a million things in their survey, surely we would notice such a bright source and inspect it in detail? It seems like there is basically nothing in the sky that bright at that redshift.
Just realized, if you combine colonization and radio beacons, 1/1000x galaxy mass would be enough to make an artificial pattern of >2.5mJy sources over an area of the sky that’s bigger than NVSS’s beam size, and that may have been noticed by someone as an anomalous cluster/pattern of radio sources.
Between the analysis we’ve done so far and revisiting Anders and Stuart’s colonization analysis, I think it’s unlikely that there are unobserved aliens who are worth looking for. Especially given that 1/1000 of a galaxy is a pretty negligible budget, I expect someone would have been willing to spend >1 galaxy on this project if it makes sense and that’s a key margin.
My current plan is to award you and Stuart each $100 prizes and declare the contest closed.
It could be a drawing, but consisting of quasars, not from individual stars. A cube with a side of 1 billion ly could have a few million galaxies in it, so the drawing’s patter could be rather complex and provide tens or hundred kilobytes of information. Or else, the drawing could be rather simple beacon like a circle.
According to this paper (which I linked to), it looked in detail at a set of S > 1.3 Jy radio sources (274 of them), in a small patch of the sky, which makes me think that there are enough bright radio sources that 1.5 Jy wouldn’t stand out that much. EDIT: Oh you can’t tell the redshift of a radio source without looking at it optically, but that requires “determine positions accurate enough to establish optical counterparts” which can’t be done with the NVSS survey data. The paper linked above did it by using another more accurate radio survey to establish optical counterparts but that survey only covered a small patch of the sky.
1580 is much more than 2.5, and even there are only a million things in their survey, surely we would notice such a bright source and inspect it in detail? It seems like there is basically nothing in the sky that bright at that redshift.
Just realized, if you combine colonization and radio beacons, 1/1000x galaxy mass would be enough to make an artificial pattern of >2.5mJy sources over an area of the sky that’s bigger than NVSS’s beam size, and that may have been noticed by someone as an anomalous cluster/pattern of radio sources.
Between the analysis we’ve done so far and revisiting Anders and Stuart’s colonization analysis, I think it’s unlikely that there are unobserved aliens who are worth looking for. Especially given that 1/1000 of a galaxy is a pretty negligible budget, I expect someone would have been willing to spend >1 galaxy on this project if it makes sense and that’s a key margin.
My current plan is to award you and Stuart each $100 prizes and declare the contest closed.
It could be a drawing, but consisting of quasars, not from individual stars. A cube with a side of 1 billion ly could have a few million galaxies in it, so the drawing’s patter could be rather complex and provide tens or hundred kilobytes of information. Or else, the drawing could be rather simple beacon like a circle.
According to this paper (which I linked to), it looked in detail at a set of S > 1.3 Jy radio sources (274 of them), in a small patch of the sky, which makes me think that there are enough bright radio sources that 1.5 Jy wouldn’t stand out that much. EDIT: Oh you can’t tell the redshift of a radio source without looking at it optically, but that requires “determine positions accurate enough to establish optical counterparts” which can’t be done with the NVSS survey data. The paper linked above did it by using another more accurate radio survey to establish optical counterparts but that survey only covered a small patch of the sky.