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If I saw a bright pink duck I would wonder how that duck came to be. If someone called it's origins mysterious I wouldn't write a string of angry HN posts about
by idiotsecant 5y ago
If I saw a bright pink duck I would wonder how that duck came to be. If someone called it's origins mysterious I wouldn't write a string of angry HN posts about it, I don't think.
- dekhn 5y agoIf I saw a bright pink duck I would expect that a neighbor's kid had painted the duck. Horses, not zebras, unless you're on the african savannah.
- isaacimagine 5y agoDid the kid paint the radio waves too? In all seriousness, why is it brighter than expected? What's the expected brightness for such an object, and how many error bars is it away from this value?
- dekhn 5y agoSee the text after Figure 4, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04272-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04272-x Since I am not an expert astronomer (just a helpful computational person who has worked in the field) I can't give you a detailed ELI5, but they talk a lot about how it looks different from existing examples, and how to find more examples of this type (so you can do surveys; modern astronomers don't like to study one-offs, as they are biased, and instead prefer to accumulate a larger sample of instances).
- me_me_me 5y agoYour analogy is incorrect. The existence of this megastar was falls under theoretically possible but never discovered. Analogous would be an albino duck, existence inferred from albinos existing in every animal, but say an albino duck was not observed before. Discovering bright pink duck would be akin to discovering something that our models cannot account for or explain.
- ceejayoz 5y agoAgain, from the article. > “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.” That's interesting, and apparently unexpected.
- c22 5y agoI've seen pink flamingos so I think my existing model of "bird things" could accommodate a pink duck.
- dekhn 5y agoFlamingos are pink because they eat pink shrimp. The difference is that pinkness in animals is specific to species and we have explanations for why they are pink. And we also have explanations for albinism, but it's not limited to specific species- it's found widely, across the complex life domain. Find a pink duck? OK, the neighbor painted a duck. Find a population of pink ducks that reproduce and their children are all pink? OK, now we have an interesting situation.
- ceejayoz 5y agoCool. Now: > “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.” Why is this magnetar brighter than expected, and how does it convert energy more efficiently?
- dekhn 5y agoYes, that's the interesting scientific question. The PR person saw that and somehow got very excited! The reality is, this object will be placed in a database and people will probably follow it up, but not with high priority. Astronomers have hundreds of years of experience in seeing things in the sky that couldn't be explained, and either were "entirely new thing we never saw before" (like pulsars) and even theorists suggesting looking for things that only got recognized once we knew what black holes were. This is common. I wouldn't describe it as mysterious, just unexpected.