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A Cosmic Burst Repeats, Deepening a Mystery
- raziel2701 9y agoMy guess is intergalactic warfare. They can keep their magnetars, my explanation adds intrigue!
- Errorcod3 9y ago"magnetars generally form from stellar explosions" The cause of these magnetars could be intergalactic warfare! Who needs nukes when you can blow up a star...
- graycat 9y agoIIRC, magnetars are astounding, mean, wicked, shocking things. Don't want to be anywhere near one of those puppies.
- yoodenvranx 9y agoPerhaps we witnessed the birth of a new Chaos God? Or the Emporor did some maintainance work on the Astronomicon.
- hinkley 9y agoGalactic bypass.
- dmichulke 9y agoTogether 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.
- tunap 9y agoOr, perhaps, our galaxy has been identified, observed and quarantined to prevent the spread of war and enslavement. God, The Universe & Everything Else https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQQAv5svkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQQAv5svkk
- graycat 9y agoIn 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!
- zeroer 9y agoIn your explanation, how does it repeat? 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.
- graycat 9y agoThanks! 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.
- __jal 9y agoNah. Mating-fitness displays.
- ccvannorman 9y agoNah, merely cruise ships going into warp between intergalactic planets.
- Errorcod3 9y ago"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."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- podiki 9y agoFurthermore, 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.
- perseusprime11 9y agoOccam's Razor: faulty equipment
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThat 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.
- perseusprime11 9y agoCould it not be signals from our own equipment/satellites/spy planes/etc?
- winfred 9y agoThese 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.
- cmurf 9y agoIt'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.
- mikeash 9y agoFirst person to achieve arbitrary code execution on the simulator gets 100 internet points.
- foota 9y agoInternet points redeemable for anything with a working exploit.
- mjevans 9y agoWouldn'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.
- neuronexmachina 9y agoThat's basically the premise of Scott Meyer's "Off to be the Wizard" (Magic 2.0) book series. It's a lot of fun, I recommend it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Meyer_(author)#Magic_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Meyer_(author)#Magic_2.0 > 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.
- rzzzt 9y agoI'd like to see a VM escape.
- yourapostasy 9y agoOne variation on where an exploit of the simulation might lead to: http://i.imgur.com/8KrABb5.png http://i.imgur.com/8KrABb5.png
- mysterypie 9y agoWhat's the difference between these Fast Radio Bursts and the Wow signal[1], which also seems to be described as a very powerful fast radio signal? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
- podiki 9y agoThe "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.
- drjesusphd 9y agoWhoa, really?
- podiki 9y agoYup. 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).
- elorant 9y agoIs 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.
- adam12 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
- elorant 9y agoI'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.
- ccvannorman 9y agoIf 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).
- mattmanser 9y agoYou haven't read Contact (or have forgotten some of the plot). He explicitly circumvents this in the book. Read it a few weeks ago. Pretty great, though the ending is a bit inconsistent and a bit 80s.
- nowarninglabel 9y agoPerhaps, in a way, The Sparrow.
- derekerdmann 9y ago"the FRBs were as blinding as flash grenades in a dark forest" Just that much should be terrifying for anyone who's read The Three-Body Problem and its sequels.
- podiki 9y agoI 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.] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton [2] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/mnras/stv1242 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/mn... or arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165
- graycat 9y agoThe 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.
- zeroer 9y agoI 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.
- zeroer 9y agoI'm reminded of the quote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The universe is amazing and terrifying.
- graycat 9y ago"Not only stranger than we suppose but stranger than we can suppose."!
- simonh 9y agoIf we're Turing Complete doesn't that mean there is nothing supposable that we are not capable of supposing?
- bveach 9y agoHey 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.
- shrimp_emoji 9y agoIs this spam?
- 9y ago
- graycat 9y agoMay 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. The spark is the source of the FRB. Wild guess!
- db48x 9y agoYou 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.
- graycat 9y agoWild 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!
- suls 9y agoSo 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?
- mirimir 9y agoYep.
- pavement 9y ago...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.
- beezle 9y agoHmm... 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)
- ianai 9y agoI went to college near there. I really miss being near stuff like the VLA. Plus every (clear sky) night being perfect for looking up!
- JauntTrooper 9y agoMy favorite theory is that they are actually artificial, alien light sails being used to travel. http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25609/fast-radio-bursts-alien-space-travel/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25609/fast-radio-burs...
- 19eightyfour 9y agoIt 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.
- mseepgood 9y ago> 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.
- 19eightyfour 9y agoLol. 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.
- derefr 9y agoAre 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.
- varjag 9y ago> The light buckets will act like floodlights in reverse, pulling in radio waves from a huge swath of sky. So basically, they are nothing like floodlights. OK I get it analogies are often important to make science accessible by the public, but at some point it just becomes confusing atop of incorrect.
- true_religion 9y agoBuckets was a good analogy. I don't know why the writer decided to add another totally orthogonal atop it.
- taneq 9y agoYou mean you wouldn't describe them as basically backwards dark-suckers but in the radio spectrum?