13 ms·
A variable signal at heart of the Milky Way
- GhettoComputers 5y agoIt mentioned its possibly a pulsar, it could just be a pulsar and magnetar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
- MadameBanaan 5y agoI'm not asking if someone has access to https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 and could upload the article on SciHub ...
- perihelions 5y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00652 https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00652
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shoto_io 5y agoGlad you didn’t asked!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rendall 5y agoIs 'signal' the appropriate word, here? An astronomical term of art? Signal usually implies intent, doesn't it?
- pavlov 5y agoIf you take signal as simply “discernible from noise”, then it doesn’t require intent or a unique sender.
- detaro 5y agoNot necessarily. E.g. analyzing data from natural events is still "signals processing", even though there is no intent behind an earth quake etc.
- awb 5y agoOxford defines “signal” as: 1. a gesture, action, or sound that is used to convey information or instructions, typically by prearrangement between the parties concerned. 2. an electrical impulse or radio wave transmitted or received. The second definition doesn’t require intent.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoI doubt it. E.g. the headline "New gravitational wave detector picks up possible signal" (1) does not imply intent, just measuring a definite event and not just noise. 1) https://www.livescience.com/gravitational-wave-detector-strange-bumps.html https://www.livescience.com/gravitational-wave-detector-stra...
- jcims 5y agoJust something that I started doing the last couple of years, searching for for ‘etymology of <insert word here>’ instead of definition. It usually leads to pretty interesting and informative results, particularly when a word selection feels strained.
- pcmaffey 5y agoSkip the search engine and just use etymonline.com
- guerrilla 5y agoWiktionary is excellent for this too.
- prawn 5y agoI do this too and then talk through the interesting ones with my kids to encourage them to think about everything they encounter. e.g., this interesting theory for the origin of the surname "Kneebone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_surnames#Anglicised_names_and_folk_etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_surnames#Anglicised_na...
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago"Signal" is used this way throughout physics. For example, CERN has an explainer on the search for the Higgs boson that says, > When physicists search for a signal of the Higgs boson, they select particle collisions with observed characteristics similar to those a Higgs production would feature. The "signal" comes from the process being studied, and the rest (at least whatever parts can be modeled stochastically) is "noise." One person's signal is another person's noise, depending on what each person is studying. 1. https://cms.cern/physics/higgs-boson-terms-and-definitions https://cms.cern/physics/higgs-boson-terms-and-definitions
- HenryKissinger 5y ago> The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it." A signal-emitting star being temporarily obscured by massive objects passing close enough to block the signal in our direction, or smaller objects at a further distance? Asteroids? Planets? Other stars? Dwarf stars? Maybe it's a crowded system, which may look like randomness. If I'm standing on one side of a busy road with a lamp aimed at you and you're on the other side observing the light, the seemingly random passage of vehicles will make the signal look random.
- donohoe 5y agoNew random number generator! "The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it."
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoWhat if other people use the same signal?
- willvarfar 5y agoCloudfare famously uses images of a wall of lava lamps as a random number generator (https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ...) Makes me wonder if photos of the sky are sufficiently random to be used this way? Does the image vary enough and does an attacker see a sufficiently different view even if really physically close? Etc.
- mcdonje 5y agoThat sounds like a non-trivial energy expenditure. Hopefully it's part of their office heating plan.
- gambiting 5y agoIt looks like there's 100 lamps. If they have regular 20W bulbs in them like any lava lamp, then that's just 2kW being used for this. Not nothing, but in an office it might as well be. That's less than a single AC unit. If you want to save energy in an office start by switching off equipment at night.
- mkr-hn 5y agoIt also helps serve the needs of millions of websites. This is like the mileage of a freight train: you have to look at how many tons it carries in that distance compared to alternatives. That's 2KW for easy true randomness. They have to get it some way, and this is probably the most efficient option for their purposes.
- gchokov 5y agoThe black hole eating stars, one by one.
- thedudeabides5 5y agoLike this person's guess, only speculation of what this actually is currently on the message board. If you were going to put a signal (that was also a puzzle to be unlocked), seems like the center of the galaxy would be a good place to make it emit from. Kind of obvious place to look. But yeah, would almost certainly fall into the black hole in the center in a couple million years or whatever.
- waltbosz 5y agoAgreed that the center of galaxy is the best place to put up a billboard. Ha, what if that's all it was, an advert, "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine." Galactic trolls, ha. Is the signal's data available publicly? I wonder what the cryptanalyst community would think of it. I would think that a intelligent species capable of placing a galactic billboard at the center of the galaxy would be intelligent enough to encode their message in an easy to decipher manner. Although, what does "easy to decipher" mean to a species with that technology. They may have stopped using any form of language that we would understand, generations ago. Is math a universal language? Could an alien species use a number system that we wouldn't recognize?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dddw 5y agoIntergalactic number station makes sense. Starting to sound like an episode of Lost
- peterhil 5y agoI was also interested about the data (and cryptanalysis on it) – the best I could find with a quick inquiry was the original article published in The Astrophysics Journal: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 There is an open access version at ArxiV.org: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoLem's His Master's Voice comes to mind.
- _jal 5y agoWe have found OnOff! Beware the Emergence...
- skywal_l 5y agoLove Vernor Vinge. Too bad is not as proficient as other world building science fiction authors, but if the pattern is correct, he should drop a new Zones of Thought book pretty soon.
- carapace 5y agos/proficient/prolific/ ?
- kabdib 5y agoI've pretty much given up hope.
- throw1234651234 5y agoThe part about the telepathic doggies was a downward slide anyway.
- gcr 5y agoThis is the plot of "The Island" by Peter Watts! See https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf
- causi 5y agoThank you for posting that. Odd how it's so much different that most of Watts' writing. Normally I consider Watts to be in my category of "authors whose ideas are irresistible but whose writing style is tortuous" thanks to him fitting five or six metaphors and similes into every single paragraph, but that was an excellent read. I wonder if he intended it for a different audience than his usual. I wish I could get Blindsight and Echopraxia rewritten in that style.
- uhtred 5y agoI'm glad I am not the only one who finds his writing challenging. I had to give up on Blindsight after only a few pages as I had no idea what was going on.
- causi 5y agoWhich is sad because it really is an excellent plot, but ye gods is it a miserable read. There seems to be a correlation with how good an author is at world-building and plot-weaving and how much actually reading the work is a chore. Watts isn't the only one either. Peter F Hamilton's worlds are utterly enchanting but will make you want to hit him with his own books.
- shoto_io 5y agoMr Wang and an international team, including scientists from Australia's national science agency CSIRO, Germany, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Spain and France discovered the object using the CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia. I just love how international Science is.
- fsloth 5y agoBusiness as well nowadays as software engineering teams can be easily distributed and travel and employment within EU is a non-issue. I have team members (at least) from Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Belgium, Romania, China, Germany, UK, New Zealand, Spain, Ethiopia - within company the interaction expands to teams and nationalities from US, France, India, Poland, Croatia...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hungryforcodes 5y agoWhat were you expecting exactly.
- drumhead 5y agoIts always been that way, you read about how scientists in Germany and the Uk and France secretly wrote to each other during WW1 sharing their latest thoughts and discoveries.
- dboreham 5y agoSurprised nobody has yet mentioned the book/movie "Contact" here.
- thanhhaimai 5y agoFor most things related to looking into space nowadays, we need a distributed team so we can cover the sky around the clock. It would be bad if we miss a 1 minute event "because it's daylight on our side".
- 867-5309 5y ago
- SeanFerree 5y agoVery cool!
- penjelly 5y agothe signal behaviour is curious
- hamparawa 5y agoAliens?
- aetherspawn 5y agoIt comes up every now and then… but there were some theories that these completely random but strong signals could be from a “light sail beam emitter” that is very far away and that the randomness just depends on where they’re going.
- shoto_io 5y agoDo you have a source?
- aetherspawn 5y agoThe paper that calculated the rough size of the object that could be pushed by one of these random pulses was fascinating and was posted to Hackers News a few months ago, but I'm struggling to find it. I would like to read it again, and would appreciate if anyone has the link. The gist of the paper was that these beams would be plausible to push an object in the order of magnitude of the size of a spacecraft. But the calculated energy levels of the emitter (as we observe it) would require something like a dyson sphere, which would mean that if it were actually a light sail emitter, we'd expect a highly sophisticated civilization.
- T-A 5y agoThis one estimated a beam emitter "on the scale of a large rocky planet": https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109 https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109 (my highly sophisticated approach to finding academic papers about outlandish alien technology is to search on Loeb).
- hollander 5y agoWaiting for the James Webb telescope to take a peek!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- datavirtue 5y agoI'm not saying it's aliens...but...
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- greenbit 5y agoWhat's the frequency, Kenneth? What part of the spectrum are we even talking about here?
- ud_0 5y agoThe ASKAP scans at 888MHz. From the paper, which luckily is publicly available: > It exhibited a high degree (∼ 25%) of circular polarization when it was visible. We monitored the source with the MeerKAT telescope from 2020 November to 2021 February on a 2–4 week cadence. The source was not detected with MeerKAT before 2021 February 07 when it appeared and reached a peak flux density of 5.6 mJy. The source was still highly circularly polarized, but also showed up to 80% linear polarization, and then faded rapidly with a timescale of one day. The rotation measure of the source varied significantly, from −11.8±0.8 rad m−2 to −64.0±1.5 rad m−2 , over three days. No X-ray counterpart was found in follow-up Swift or Chandra observations about a week after the first MeerKAT detection, with upper limits of ∼ 5.0 × 1031 erg s−1 (0.3–8 keV, assuming a distance ∼ 10 kpc). No counterpart is seen in new or archival near-infrared observations down to J = 20.8 mag. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf
- peterhil 5y agoThe original article about the find, that was published in The Astrophysics Journal (linked at the bottom of the article): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 And open access version at ArxiV.org: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf
- King-Aaron 5y agoSomeone forgot to unplug the microwave in the kitchen again
- 8bitsrule 5y ago"Astronomers have discovered unusual signals..." There are lots of 'unusual' radio waves in the universe; astronomers discover them almost daily. May of them are variable. But there's that word 'signal' again. Crap science journalism likes to play on the connotations, the suggestion of purpose, of meaning. Dictionary says: "An indicator, such as a gesture or colored light, that serves as a means of communication." "the astronomers tried to find the object in visual light. They found nothing." Fairly usual for radio objects. That's why they were missed until Reber came along. An interesting anomaly, I get that. Rouses the curiosity. Just stop with the 'signal' please, until it fits the case.
- wglb 5y agoSignal is a perfectly valid word in this context. See the comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28840472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28840472. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842465. And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28840517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28840517.
- deepnet 5y agoAnyone have a universally working link to access to the paper ? https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360 [edit] Found : https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00652 https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00652 Is there some of the signal available so we can analyse the randomness for possible order ?