Dark Flow and a Soft Radio Network

To the dark matter and dark energy mysteries, we can now add dark flow...

NASA’s Sasha Kashlinsky discovered a twenty degree patch of sky between Centaurus and Vela to which 700 X-ray clusters are being pulled at 611 miles per second. The significance of this is that it contradicts predictions that large-scale motion should show no preferred direction and that the motions should decrease at ever increasing distances. Kashlinsky posits that the source of the pull is "outside the currently observable universe".

I mention this because this gives us a patch of sky to which we can point our software-defined radios and perhaps observe something interesting.

The limitation is that our radios have to either be space-borne or in the Southern Hemisphere to get in on the action. Also this "dark flow' patch occurs out of the range of the Ukrainian radio telescope data visualized in a previous post:

It is my hope to create a network of Orbs - Soft Radios that can cooperate to locate celestial signals. Orbs are wide-band radios that downlink to the web using TCP/IP 802.11 protocols. Orbs talk to each other to using ham, astronomy, and ISM bands in real time. Their locations in space time is computed using GPS-disciplined internal oscillators.

References

A Short Trek to DNA Cutter M87

Tonight I was watching the city of my old workplace, JPL, burn.

While doing so I ran across UCLA data on Messier object M87, a galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole.


I opened a certain Google Earth database built from the Ukrainian observations and found out that, indeed, this RF source is one of the brightest in the universe.

But for the first time I had a possible name for bright source GR1228... could it be M87?!


M87 is very interesting because it contains a spinning black hole that is the mass of six billion of our suns, diversely radiant in frequency and direction. It has been observed at frequencies from as low 16.7 MHz, through microwave and optical frequencies, up to gamma ray frequencies. Extremely wide band radiation. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that it is a strong cosmic ray emitter as well. As such it represents a "DNA cutter". M87 gamma rays cause the emission of ultraviolet light when the upper atmosphere of Earth is impacted.

I needed to make sure that G1228 was M87, so I did some calculations and found a discrepancy between the M87's position in Google Sky and its position in the Ukrainian radio telescope database:


Now M87 has neighbors and GR1228 has neighbors, but none are so bright in the radio spectrum.



For the time being I will assume that some kind of atmospheric refraction is at work and for pointing purposes M87 is a good starting point for listening to GR1228.

I was most curious to know the current position of M87 relative to our daily experience, so I fired up Hallo Northern Sky, a free astronomy program that does time lapse on all known planets, stars, constellations and Messier objects. Running planet and star paths, past, present and future is just amazing.


Now M87 is on a line between Arcturus and Denebola. The “Star of Joy” Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the sky and Denebola is only 36 light-years from earth.

Today for thirteen hours M87 is exposing us to its DNA splitting radiation, starting at 9:23 AM CDT this morning and ended at 10:37 PM on a route slightly more overhead than the sun.

M87 makes a good calibration standard for celestial radio location activities. I would like to know how fast M87 it is spinning, its strength as a cosmic ray source, what kind of antennae one might use to track it, and if it is truly the same object as GR1228.