Radio astronomy is one of current hobbies. Some of you already know I use my PC for number crunching of data from SETI. Space is a very noisey place. We are constantly being bombarded with radion signals from objects in far deep space. Here is the current SETI project I am working on. The data was originaly received by the radio telescope at Areciebo Puerto Rico, it was sent to me today. The potion of space I am looking would be about the size of the finger nail on your little finger. Here is a graphic of what my PC is looking at.
Each line is either a separate Galaxy or a pulsar. What my PC is trying to do is identify the pulsars by the variations in the radio waves. This is a constantly changing picture. It is animated. Here is a few a few seconds after the first picture.
the amount of data is unbelievable. And this is such a tiny insignificant part of the universe. I would not even attempt to guess how many galaxies are found in just that spot which is so far from us it does not look much bigger then a pin head from here and each galaxay has millions of stars about the size of our sun or bigger. The pulsars that are within that group are the real noise makers and that is what I am looking for.
Here is what that project is looking like:
as you can see my PC is going to need about nine more hours to just measure the data, and I have a very fast PC
Amazing how the Qur'an could Know of the existence of this stuff that is even now beyond our comprehension.
the seti program was originally developed to search for extra-terrestial life, but most of the work now is to simply map the known universe. This is a project that will last for a vry long time. the known universe is quite big;D