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Mysterious fast radio bursts come in two distinct flavours
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- scotuswroteus 5y agoThank you for using an upside down open quotation mark
- scotuswroteus 5y agoI'm out here reading what I imagine is the blog operated by one of the most preeminent journals in the English language. Then I read a sentence that uses the word "tizzy." Illusion, shattered.
- broberts01 5y agoWhat is wrong with the word "tizzy"?
- tkzed49 5y agomaybe they think that using high-level vocabulary is an indicator of intelligence. Fortunately, the article does that too.
- arthurcolle 5y agoHaha this is the best comment so far. Check mate, atheists!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 5y agoImagine not knowing the word "tizzy"
- GolDDranks 5y agoUh, I didn't know it. Apparently it means "a state of nervous excitement or agitation".
- gremlinsinc 5y agoImagine getting in a "tizzy" about journalists using the word "tizzy"... that's irony for ya.
- arthurcolle 5y agoIt's fine to not know it. It's absurd to judge the merits of an article based on not knowing a word it uses. I mean seriously - you're going to judge an article based on a word YOU happen to not know? Farcical to the extreme. Made me feel like I'm in that movie from the 90s, "Dexter's Lab Ego Trip" when they are using square wheels instead of circles.
- sroussey 5y agoIt would them in a tizzy…
- omginternets 5y agoThey might even accidentally a word ;)
- neom 5y agoNot sure tizzy is common outside of commonwealth countries. I'm quite sure it's British English.
- Fezzik 5y agoI’m USA born, have lived here my entire life, and have known what “being in a tizzy” meant since… 4th or 5th grade? I thought it was a relatively common word/phrase. I do read books though, but nothing fancy. Our literacy standards are apparently spiraling downward.
- dang 5y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- foobaw 5y agoWill we ever find out what this actually means in our lifetime?
- pixel_tracing 5y agoAren’t these just quasars? Not necessarily anything that special. Are people thinking this is extra terrestrial communication of some sort?
- King-Aaron 5y agoCorrect, and it is pretty special to learn that (while still rare), they're far more common than we initially thought
- steve_adams_86 5y agoI agree. As a child I thought these would be extremely rare. In my naive little kid brain I guess I figured there must be only a handful of them known to exist, and I had endless ideas about how such a rare and unique celestial entity must have alien origins. Haha.
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- colordrops 5y agoThe article says otherwise.
- _Nat_ 5y agoNope, fast-radio-bursts (FRB's) aren't commonly attributed to quasars. From ["Not all fast radio bursts are created equal"](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03894-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03894-6), 2020-01-06: > Curiously, because the luminosity of a typical quasar is not dissimilar to the peak luminosity of an FRB, we cannot yet completely discount the involvement of supermassive black holes. But Marcote and colleagues’ results argue against that possibility, and the timescales for quasar variability are more likely to be days to months than milliseconds. Wikipedia has a [section on hypotheses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst#Origin_hypotheses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst#Origin_hypoth...).
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- runawaybottle 5y agoSo, not Aliens. Author really had a minimum page count limit, huh?
- darepublic 5y agoThey come in two flavours, not aliens and definitely not aliens
- rcurry 5y agoThank you, on behalf of all Alpha Centaurians I’d just like to assure you that the regular monthly deposits to your account will continue.
- dd444fgdfg 5y agodefinitely aliens then. I mean, surely it's obvious, these bursts are just inter-galactic radar.
- timeinput 5y agoI hadn't read about the CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) telescope before. From the wikipedia article: > The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster. that's super interesting. My limited exposure to radio astronomy relies on a lot more custom collection hardware (super cooled LNAs, with hydrogen maser clocks, ...) and mostly pure software processing. Seeing this very COTS hardware with careful processing systems is neat. > The telescope consumes 250 kilowatts of power. woah.
- pstuart 5y ago> The telescope consumes 250 kilowatts of power A better investment than bitcoin, IMHO.
- timeinput 5y agoI completely agree. I think it makes sense when they have 256 processing nodes with GPUs plus everything else, just the number caught me off guard at first.
- willis936 5y agoI work on a plasma confinement device that has a linear regulator in its 100 kV gyrotron power supply that uses 6 kW just to keep the filament warm. The coils use 10 MW during a shot. And this is considered a small machine. Science takes power.
- geezer_2 5y agoH E L P in an unknown alien tongue
- krylon 5y agoI think extraterrestrial porn is more likely. SCNR
- 8bitsrule 5y ago> Now CHIME has reversed that trend, he says, “I don’t think theorists will catch up with us.” Funny stuff. I like to imagine they're virtual galaxies resulting from perturbation theory of gravity field theory. With ordinary galaxies described in terms of exchanges of virtual galaxies. Of course, they wouldn't necessarily carry the same mass as the corresponding real galaxies.
- miika 5y agoIf there were space crafts jumping into warp speed or shit like that, then how that would look like? Imagine if FRB’s were signs of cosmic traffic it would certainly change “life out there” conversation :)
- RobertoG 5y agoSomething like that was in HN two days ago: Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431999
- drclau 5y agoJumping to warp speed is the optimistic case. Here's a pessimistic case: weapons. Maybe we're seeing signs of space faring civilisations at war.
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- CuriouslyC 5y agoMy vote is that these aren't bursts, so much as constant directional radiation that we infrequently intersect.
- DrBazza 5y agoMulti-messenger observations will eventually solve this, e.g. a correlation with LIGO, if the sensitivity is good enough and they're 'low mass' collisions. The energy needed for these signals already narrows down the category of objects it could be. As the article says, neutron star collisions and mergers, magnetars, and of course black holes.