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

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.] [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