MrPapillon

As a complete layman, it was interesting to hear about such a strange object and also about PlanetHunters. That service helped me understand what light curves were about, and in a fun way. And even more interestingly, in a useful way.

The question: How can we help again? There is the Kickstarter, and maybe more services might prove useful. For example, open source code/tools, artistic content, communication, etc... I don't expect a large spectrum of choices obviously, but I am curious about your input on that.

Oh yes, the order of magnitude wouldn't compare. I am not expecting anything with the current attention space has. So the hope is for some lucky space-related events to trigger some more general involvement. Space observation is an old tradition, but deep space observation and space exploration are still young things.

As a complete layman in all space subjects and probably even most subjects to ever exist, I keep asking myself some very naive questions.

For example, from some rather weird hypotheses:

• The space industry is opening new paths to access space with low cost solutions such as nanosats (CubeSat, 1-10kg), or picosats (0.1-1kg).
• We are now interested in one particular star. Sure it's new and we might find some answers soon about whether it keeps being interesting or not, but what if we don't in 5-10 years.
• I believe sometimes some folks build giant telescopes, and sometimes array of telescopes.

And with those hypotheses, I came up with:

Would it be possible to deploy a rather spatially-large array of micro telescopes to provide more specific info about one star at a time? Sure it might cost R&D and much more, but is it theoretically possible? What kind of dedicated tool can be of use with that particular star? (In my even more naive dreams, I was thinking about super super super large arrays to be able to get some kind of minimalistic image of the star itself, like some 32x32 pixels image, instead of just tracking an almost-infinitely small bright point. But because of shame, I would never ask that kind of question here).

Hi Greg and Chris,

I am a software engineer, following machine learning from distance, and I recently heard of neural network being produced, like the TrueNorth by IBM. Of course my question is not about whether it will be good or not, but to what extent the current CPU/GPU hardware limits you relatively to current machine learning algorithms.

edit: reposting because I got deleted for not adding question marks. So here it is: ? According to the rule, I might even get a permanent ban for adding a '?' to a non question, while I still have a question in my post, but with no question marks. This is why we need AI everywhere as soon as possible.