Earth's Radiation Fingerprint

Earth viewed from Apollo 17 (Credit : NASA)

Scientists have discovered a revolutionary way to measure Earth's radiation budget by observing our planet from the Moon. A team of astronomers have revealed that lunar observations capture Earth as a complete disk, filtering out local weather noise and revealing planet scale radiation patterns dominated by spherical harmonic functions, effectively creating a unique "fingerprint" of Earth's outgoing radiation. This Moon based perspective solves fundamental limitations of satellite observations, which struggle to achieve both temporal continuity and spatial consistency, offering a new tool for understanding global climate change with unprecedented clarity.

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More Data and Machine Learning has Kicked SETI Into High Gear

For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...

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