UNISTELLAR - MorningCalm SEPTEMBER 2018

THE L VARIABLE

Telescopes are typically expensive and difficult to use. French start-up Unistellar is hoping to change that with its compact, easy-to-use telescope, and together learn more about the universe and our role in it.

Are we alone in the cosmos? It’s a big question, but it can come up from just a passing glance at the night sky. There are serious efforts to answer it. The Drake Equation, proposed by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, defines what we would have to know to estimate how much intelligent life there might be in the Milky Way. Included in it are parameters like the rate of star creation in the galaxy, the fraction that have planets and the fraction of those that could support life — together approximating how many civilizations could be sending out signals we could detect. The Drake Equation is a starting point, and it seems there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

To get closer to an answer, we need more people watching the sky. French start-up Unistellar, together with the nonprofit SETI Institute, is hoping to help popularize astronomy. For the past four years it’s been developing the compact, user-friendly eVscope, which produces a bright and clear view of objects in the sky even amid light-polluted cities. Its crowdfunding campaign quickly became a huge hit, and at CES 2018, the eVscope was honored in the Tech for a Better World category. The prototype has been shown off at public demos in the US, France, Germany and Kenya, among other places. “We want to have this impact on society where people get more involved with science,” says Laurent Marfisi, one of Unistellar’s four founders. “And astronomy is one of the best doors to get people interested in science — questioning the universe.”

Most modern research telescopes use mirrors to reflect collected light onto the eyepiece, where objects appear bigger and brighter. The bigger the mirror, the more light it can collect. Compared to the eight to 10m mirrors in telescopes at observatories, the eVscope’s 11.4cm mirror seems unremarkable. Rather than using a larger, more expensive mirror, the eVscope has solved the problem of brightness with its image sensor. “There were big progresses made in CMOS technology and on-board computers,” Marfisi says. The eVscope’s sensor quickly gathers light at various exposures and displays a brighter image on the eyepiece in a matter of seconds. And while there are telescopes for hobbyists with bigger mirrors and greater modularity, these have a high barrier of entry, requiring assembly and calibration. They can also weigh over 40kg. The eVscope only requires you to connect the scope to its included tripod to start using it, and at just 7kg, it’s small enough to fit into a backpack.

About a year and a half ago, Franck Marchis, a lead scientist at the SETI Institute, heard about the eVscope while attending CES 2017. “I was a bit skeptical,” he says. But as he learned about the eVscope’s use of data processing to produce a better view of the sky in real time, he realized how smart it was. “I thought, ‘That’s exactly what we should have done a long time ago.’”

In July 2017, Marchis and Unistellar officially joined forces. Marchis’ research at the SETI Institute focuses on finding evidence of life on exoplanets, and as a science communicator, he believes that greater public engagement in the study of the universe is not just noble, but necessary. The eVscope is built around the promotion of citizen science. It contains a database of asteroids, as well as one with some millions of stars collected from professional astronomers, which essentially functions as a map the eVscope uses to automatically align to a target. Unistellar is also working on an app that will allow users to submit observations to professional astronomers. Marchis envisions being able to send mass alerts for observation events, such as when a disintegrating comet passes near Earth.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how much activity there is in the sky, but a look through the eVscope reminds us. In the solar system alone there are over 700,000 known asteroids. With so much to study, astronomers are often revising what we thought we knew. Just this past July, scientists discovered 10 new moons orbiting Jupiter. Another relatively new discovery is that the average star likely has at least one orbiting planet — many of them having more, with some of those surely at a habitable distance from their sun. Such revelations must have shifted Drake Equation estimates.

Still, our slice of the universe has been quiet. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi casually noted what seems to be a discrepancy between the immensity of the galaxy and its perfect silence. Maybe the Milky Way is clamoring with signals, and we lack the technology to detect them. But one explanation looks at L, the last variable of the Drake Equation. It’s defined as “the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.” The explanation suggests that the longer a civilization with the tech to send signals into space has been doing so, the more likely it is that the civilization will have arrived at a point of self-destruction. If this seems pessimistic, we should remember that Fermi made his observation just years after his work on the Manhattan Project helped develop the world’s first nuclear weapon.

Astronomy started as a boyhood passion for Marfisi, but it has been a lifelong teacher. “It can have a role in developing a kind of wisdom about life,” he says. Until Unistellar delivers the first industrially produced eVscopes in April 2019, it will continue to hold public demos, where it quickly becomes clear just how collaborative and social astronomy can be.

If Marchis one day meets a different intelligent civilization, these are the first questions he will ask: “How did you manage to survive all these problems you probably created? How did you overcome the division in your society?” There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer. The answer could be beyond our ability to understand. But we should ask anyway. A distant star is really just a winking question mark.