Saturday, December 06, 2014

[kszojvug] Cosmological mirroring

Echo back digitized astronomical images toward the direction the images were taken.  Alien SETI astronomers get a picture of their own galaxy from an external vantage point, a snapshot from millions or even billions of years in their past because of the round trip delay.  Both features would make the picture interesting to them.  Especially if a galaxy merger is happening.

What is the threshold distance beyond which a signal will never reach because the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light?  The galaxies in Hubble Deep Field and Hubble Ultra Deep Field might be too far.

Will the destination move too much before the signal gets there?

Designing an image data format (including forward error correction) that the recipients can decode will be a challenge.

What kind of metadata accompanying the image would be useful for the recipients?  They will, of course, know unambiguously from where the image was taken from.

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