I am reminded of my favorite part of the whole Fast Radio Burst(FRB) story so far:
Since they had only been observed at 1.4 GHz, it was natural to think it was some sort of interference, since that is a busy frequency. Similar events that seemed to be terrestrial in origin were called Perytons (a mythological bird [1]) for some reason. This called into doubt that the FRBs were extragalactic, as claimed.
Then there was this fantastic paper [2] that completely figured it out (itself amazing). Turns out the "peryton" signals were from a microwave at a nearby building (lunch area for the lab or visitors) being opened while still on. There was just a grazing angle with the telescope that didn't block the signal, and the radio pulse looked very similar to an FRB.
The nail in the coffin? This plot (figure 4 and 7) showing that these signals peaked around lunchtime! Meanwhile the true FRBs were uniform in time, and so were not the same and agreed upon to not simply be interference.
[Disclaimer: I wrote a paper on FRBs, but was not involved in that work.]
The article kept saying "as much energy as 500 million suns". They lost me: If they meant "power of 500 million suns", then that's plenty amazing but okay. But "energy of 500 million suns" -- wow! Just blew the top off my scale of credibility. That is, for "the energy of 500 millon suns", take the mass of 500 millon suns, and calculate the energy from E = mc^2 and get a big number, especially for some radio waves lasting only a few milliseconds.
Of course, with more context, their statement was "powered by as much energy as 500 million suns", so they were working hard to confuse energy and power.
Eventually in the article I got the impression that they really meant the "power of 500 million suns" -- big difference between energy and power
e.g., the difference between KW and KWh, between Joules and Watts (for people who like MKS units).
Also likely want to make clear that are assuming that power level was uniform in all directions from the source, that is, not just beamed in a narrow beam pointed at earth.
Also of similar interest is an associated article at that site on detection of a cosmic ray with energy 320 EeV, that is, a well thrown bowling ball.
I thought the same thing. Clearly they meant the power. An explosion with 500-million suns worth of mass-energy would end life on Earth, 3 billion light years away or not.
"The repeater may have created more questions than it delivered answers."
Difficult to understand as it is irregular with bursts at random intervals. "After 50 hours of seeing none during previous observations, the team now spotted them frequently, including, one time, a “double burst” of signals only 23 seconds apart."
Furthermore, the older FRBs were not seen to repeat, though given how short the signal is, it could have been missed in followup observations. It is quite possible that although these events all seem to be similar, they may have different origins or mechanisms.
That only happens when a range of telescopes point at a certain spot in the sky? It's possible, but by now they've likely ruled out most possible malfunctions.
These radio telescopes have a fairly narrow focus and when two telescopes located on different continents aim at a source several billion light years away, their focal points do not overlap anywhere near earth, so that rules out anything on or near earth. You could come up with a theory where it does originate on earth, but it wouldn't pass Occam's razor.
I (mistakenly) thought you were referring to faulty equipment at the FRB. As in someone opened the door of a galactic scale microwave oven analogue megaparsecs away.
And that sloppy engineering is still Occam's Razor no matter the scale or distance.
Together with the fact that no bursts are seen in the Milky Way would mean that either they didn't find anyone here or us Milky Way guys are just too primitive.
In physics, we want explanations that are really crazy enough. Okay: It turns out that space-time curvature has an upper limit, and at that limit the curvature suddenly flattens with a big release of energy.
Now, if I knew enough physics to evaluate this crazy guess, then I would, but I won't until I make more progress with my startup!
As for Simons who pays for Quanta, make money first, do theoretical, cosmological physics later!
Also, curvature is a non-local phenomenon. In the sense that if you take a finite volume of space, re-arrange the spacetime however you like, you still have to have the same total curvature inside the volume. You don't have a free hand to reduce total curvature in a volume of spacetime without also altering the boundary.
Thanks! Nice differential geometry! I have some good books and plenty of background to read them, but I do need to read them. Want to; have for a long time; came close a few times but always something got in the way; will have to wait until my startup is done.
It seems like 500 Million suns worth of energy ( not totally converted into momentum -- since we can observe it ) to power a spaceship, by an advanced civilisation, is a bit wasteful.
I think it's more likely if FRBs are from a civilization they represent something like the output of an industrial process ( maybe for creating dark matter or other exotic materials ), or the equivalent of blasting to get access to minerals, or even a weapon, like a super powerful nuclear or dark matter weapon. Someplace the expenditure of energy is justified by the cost. Or maybe it's a race of super-advanced giants playing with enormous laser pointers just for fun.
> It seems like 500 Million suns worth of energy ( not totally converted into momentum -- since we can observe it ) to power a spaceship, by an advanced civilisation, is a bit wasteful.
Wastefulness doesn't stop civilizations from doing something. It could be the spaceship equivalent of a SUV.
Lol. That's good. So true. I didn't think of that. It's more like "unconscious" nature that is usually more efficient instead of civilizations. Although I don't understand why some crop genomes have so many more genomes than humans. Maybe wastefulness is everywhere.
Are you talking about polyploid genes? Having more copies of each gene per cell nucleus is effectively RAID: it protects against copying errors, and therefore against genetic disorders and cancers. This does have the side-effect of increasing the size of the nucleus of each cell, which is a problem if you're an animal with cells that need to float around in a blood stream and squeeze through tiny capillaries—but not if you're a plant, with all your cells locked in place.
That's also an important consideration I hadn't thought of. The plants can have the cell size constraint relaxed because of their different morphology / physiology.
In fact, it came from me looking at human and other vertebrate genomes, and then looking at some reference "crop" genomes and seeing multiples as many genes. I didn't know if they are polyploid copies as you say or not tho it could have been. I'll try to find the links where I saw these numbers (from a few years ago now) and update.
( there are many with over 30,000 genes ( cf humans < 20,000 ) and there are a few big ones ( Aegilops tauschii (Tausch's goatgrass) has 4.3Gb ), and most are more than 200 Mb ( cf fruit fly is around 180Mbp )
The weird thing is that genome size is correlated with "complexity" in non-animal world too. With fungi and so on having smaller genomes generally than large plants. All this seems weird because my assumption is that animals are more "complex" than plants. So either there is a lot of redundancy there or plants have some kind of unseen complexity. It would be cool to see models that try to quantify the explanations of large genomes given here by others ( error and viral resistance and freer nuclear sizing ) and see if those models can account for the sizes somehow, or if there might be more to the picture.
Another possibility is that genomes grow with genetic manipulation so cross-breeds have bigger genomes. But what does that say for humans? Are we the result of genetic breeding as well?
To put a finer point on it, the limit on cell size is closer to the definitional difference between what makes something a "plant" vs an "animal" than almost anything else. Plants, due to their stable tissue structures, don't need to worry about their cell size, and therefore don't need to worry about unbounded DNA growth. Because of this, they have evolved to take advantage of having "more" DNA. Yes, polyploid plants are generally healthier, because plants expect polyploidy. But even without polyploidy, plants have large amounts of "specialized-use" genetic material, libraries of specific responses (e.g. immune responses) to specific problems (e.g. parasites) that may have only existed millions of years ago. They can just keep all these one-off solutions around, evolving to protect themselves against one more thing at a time.
(This is also why plants tend to be full of weird organic molecules like terpenes, which are beneficial to nearly every animal alive today: those chemicals probably protected them from something at some point, and the genes responsible for making them have had no reason to be shut off since then.)
But animals, with a finite limit on gene-base size, must solve problems differently. Animals evolve along different lines—polyploid mutations usually result in non-viable offspring for animal species, because animals frequently have mutations that assume diploidy, with complex machinery to favor better vs. worse versions of each diploid gene using silencing or epigenetic methylation. And more generally, animals evolve solutions to whole classes of problems that have compact genetic representations. We don't have a million custom immune responses; instead, we have xenograft rejection genes, T-cells, livers and kidneys, saliva and stomach acid, the sensation of itching, skin that sheds and skin oil that clears pores, and put together, those mechanisms handle 99% of cases just fine.
And often we don't need any of those; the primary "solution" that animals have to almost every problem, is just the ability to move away from the source of the problem. If there's a predator, you can just run away. You don't need to know what the thing is, to run away from it; you just run away! Universal solution! To do that, we need a lot of things: not just limbs, but sensory organs, to know where we are and where the predator is; and nerves, to link the two; and even some sort of instinct for what predators exist, or memory to record sense-fear associations. But all those genes still take up far less space than immune proteases individualized for every bacterium and fungus on earth.
a genome is a dartboard, a virus is a dart, having a giant dartboard means the dart is more likely not to hit a bullseye (really big. so big you can't even throw the dart far enough to reach[1])
I bought my first SUV a few weeks ago. It's a Jeep renegade, thus not very big, still the comfort from big space inside (without a huge 2-D surface) is priceless.
Nice. Wrangler is my poison of choice, but stumbled upon a 70s-era Defender near my house recently, and a co-worker owns an even older one. Beautiful vehicles.
I've been thinking about a Wrangler myself, something with the I-6 if I can still find one.
But that mention of the Defender sent me looking, and I really like how it looks. But unless I get a much better (much, much better!) job somewhere, I can't even afford a used one. There are ones on CL right now in my area, dating from the 80s (but with low, low miles for some reason) selling for close to 90K - and if I'm going to spend that kind of money locally, I might as well get a Local Motors Rally Fighter!
Honestly, though, what I would love to own isn't for sale yet, and if they ever do finish them for sale, likely they won't sell them to anyone in the US:
Yeah they do get a somewhat overzealous helping of shade. Sometimes it's more of a "pile on" effect than actually deserved. But I literally think Tsubi "pajero" ruined everything forever with their cynical naming. Leopard. Yeah, right.
Every new thing seems wasteful. Try explaining to your grand-grand-granddad why there are huge manufacturing cities in China, global supply chains, hundreds of thousands of undersea cables, worldwide network of cables and base stations in order to get you a funny cat video into your pocket in park.
If they're coming from different locations, then any one ship's path would be disrupted by "foreign" sources, making it somewhat unreliable. Worst would be when two sources are blowing (puffing?) at a ship between them.
Or, maybe they are intended to push ships: alien ships, to keep them away.
Or, maybe the ships are messages in bottles, and the senders don't care where they end up. Their current Voyagers? Our future Voyagers?
Hey there - I was unable to comment on an old post of your for some reason. To be discreet... Do you still work at the company where you played violin lessons one night in your office and Mr. Smith heard? :) If so, look me up. Last name, Veach. I work in GPE. I have a question for you.
When I was a B-school prof, one of my students was getting a pilot's license and asked me to contact FedEx for him, and I did. I got a note back from Smith that FedEx would welcome the application from the student but had a long list of pilot applications.
No. I saw one of his/her comments regarding something that happened at this company. He spoke with a lot of knowledge about something that I am working on.. It was totally random that I found the post. I was doing a google search for information regarding our biggest competition, and it came up. I just created a profile so I could comment. I don't know much about this website, so I'm sorry if my comment isn't ok.
If he still has access to the employee database, he will be able to look me up by my last name.
The "Fast" in Fast Radio Bursts is because the signal lasts only milliseconds, while the Wow signal lasted thousands of times longer, for over a minute.
Yup. If you look on the Wikipedia article for the Wow event, it lasted for the entire observing window, so that implies it could have lasted longer before/after. Meanwhile FRBs are quite amazing because they are so quick. It's a lot of energy in a very small time, which leads people to consider compact objects as part of the origin (short burst leaves very small distance from the light travel time for the event to be coherent).
May I propose: There is (A) a neutron star and (B) another dense object, a neutron star or a black hole, and the two have an electrostatic potential between them and are in very close orbits. Occasionally a spark jumps between the two. If the (A) neutron star is negative, then the spark consists of electrons. Else the spark consists of protons.
You may propose it, but wild guesses don't really help. The space of all possible ideas is far too vast for a random guess to have any chance of hitting on a physically plausible idea, let alone the correct idea.
I'm no physicist myself, but in this case I suspect that a net electric charge of that magnitude would discharge continuously, because the electric field would be large enough to accelerate charged matter away from the surface. You may have noticed that even our sun produces a continuous solar wind made of charged particles. It's losing a billion kilograms per second, and it has no overall net charge.
Wild guesses are nearly always junk, but some of the best physics looked like wild guesses before lots of testing.
I didn't get into just how an object could have a net electric charge, but IIRC such a state is accepted as possible in astrophysics.
For the FRB being not continuous but only intermittent, maybe the orbit is not perfectly circular; maybe there are other effects that make the FRB intermittent.
Science does not start with a testable hypothesis but with intuitive guesses; the more solid stuff comes later.
In this case, for these FRBs, we know so little that doing solid science has to wait and all of us can guess!
Is there any sci-fi book out there that describes something similar? Since we have no clue on what this is I'd be interested in reading far-fetched theories.
I've read Contact and I don't think it had anything similar to this. In Contact the message was coming from a planet system a mere 50 light years away and was no way that powerful.
If it's 3 billion communication-years away, in order to see Earth they'd have seen it 3 billion years ago at the time of viewing. Therefore, for this signal to be targeted at Earth, they'd be targeting an Earth SIX billion years ago (we didn't even exist yet).
So this thing is located 1 gigaparsec away from us. The article also mentions that this thing is "probably less than 100 years old".
Which then means that this all happend 3 billion (+/- 100) years ago but we are only observing it now?
...it would take a very special magnetar to unleash
such monstrous FRBs in quick succession. “A neutron
star bursting at this rate for thousands of years
would quickly run out of fuel,” he said. His best
guess is that the repeater is a very young magnetar —
probably less than 100 years old.
Yes, billions of years ago, there was a thing that lasted possibly one hundred years, but in that time during its existence it emitted radio bursts, and we're only noticing them right now.
It's just a bug in the holomatrix of the universe. As we get better peering behind the curtain, we'll see more bugs and maybe even be able to exploit them. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.
On the one hand, we sure seem pretty cooperative for a race designed to be warlike. Though on the other, I can imagine a race to whom we're horrifically warlike. I guess it's all a matter of perspective.
We're pretty social with other humans. But we tend to treat other animals pretty shitily. Also, there's serious argument that we committed genocide upon Neanderthals and perhaps some other early-human offshoots.
Wouldn't that be "real magic"? Re-writing the state of the universe or otherwise influencing how that state progresses? I have read stories where 'magic' causes side effects.
> The series follows Martin Banks, a programmer from 2012, who uses a computer file that allows him to alter reality to time travel to medieval England where he joins a community of other computer programmers posing as wizards.
Hmm... something funky going down in Quemado? Experiments at the lightning farm? If you haven't done the self-guided tour of the VLA, you've just not lived yet! Though it was pretty cool seeing the all out there (highly recommend taking along some lawn chairs and camping out a bit north of Quemado for some very dark sky viewing)
Since they had only been observed at 1.4 GHz, it was natural to think it was some sort of interference, since that is a busy frequency. Similar events that seemed to be terrestrial in origin were called Perytons (a mythological bird [1]) for some reason. This called into doubt that the FRBs were extragalactic, as claimed.
Then there was this fantastic paper [2] that completely figured it out (itself amazing). Turns out the "peryton" signals were from a microwave at a nearby building (lunch area for the lab or visitors) being opened while still on. There was just a grazing angle with the telescope that didn't block the signal, and the radio pulse looked very similar to an FRB.
The nail in the coffin? This plot (figure 4 and 7) showing that these signals peaked around lunchtime! Meanwhile the true FRBs were uniform in time, and so were not the same and agreed upon to not simply be interference.
[Disclaimer: I wrote a paper on FRBs, but was not involved in that work.]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton
[2] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/mn...
or
arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165