The source of puzzling radio wave bursts detected by two of the world’s largest telescopes has been found, and the answer turns out to come from the research facilities’ tea rooms, not extragalactic space.

Earlier this year, Swinburne University’s Emily Petroff was the lead author of a report on the first observation of a fast radio burst (FRB) in real time. Previously, the enormously powerful but poorly understood events known as FRBs had only been detected in the records of large radio telescopes years after they happened.

However, among those records was something else, which astronomers named perytons. The first peryton detected was in 1998, although it was not recognized as such until 2011. Perytons look sufficiently like FRBs that astronomers even speculated that the first FRB, known as 010724, might actually have been a peryton.

Perytons last about half a second and are “frequency-swept,” meaning different frequencies arrive at different times, which in perytons’s case means the high frequencies appear first. Petroff says, frequency-sweeping is commonly associated with signals that have passed through an interstellar medium that has delayed certain frequencies more than others.

However, while FRBs are believed to come from outside our own galaxy, perytons were thought to be terrestrial in origin, since they registered on multiple beams of the radio telescopes, something that should only be possible for events that are very nearby or spread across a huge area of the sky.

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Spiny Norman said:

The source of puzzling radio wave bursts detected by two of the world’s largest telescopes has been found, and the answer turns out to come from the research facilities’ tea rooms, not extragalactic space.

Earlier this year, Swinburne University’s Emily Petroff was the lead author of a report on the first observation of a fast radio burst (FRB) in real time. Previously, the enormously powerful but poorly understood events known as FRBs had only been detected in the records of large radio telescopes years after they happened.

However, among those records was something else, which astronomers named perytons. The first peryton detected was in 1998, although it was not recognized as such until 2011. Perytons look sufficiently like FRBs that astronomers even speculated that the first FRB, known as 010724, might actually have been a peryton.

Perytons last about half a second and are “frequency-swept,” meaning different frequencies arrive at different times, which in perytons’s case means the high frequencies appear first. Petroff says, frequency-sweeping is commonly associated with signals that have passed through an interstellar medium that has delayed certain frequencies more than others.

However, while FRBs are believed to come from outside our own galaxy, perytons were thought to be terrestrial in origin, since they registered on multiple beams of the radio telescopes, something that should only be possible for events that are very nearby or spread across a huge area of the sky.

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Cool :)

like.

:-)

Are they sure some of the FRB’s were not coming from Wookies direction?

Perytons

they come from microwaves ovens ,

but no one is sure how Perytons are coming from microwave ovens

This story reminds me of a job I had over twenty years ago, in Newcastle from memory. A data centre was experiencing intermittent server shutdowns. There was no apparent pattern in the times they’d go tits up and I was called in to investigate. I placed test equipment around the facility, peered under floors, into roof spaces, checked all the wiring etc.

I’d been there two or three days. There had been a few incidents, but I hadn’t captured anything on any of the test equipment and was beginning to wonder where I was going with it. I was standing at a large window looking over a river entrance (port) and watching a Naval warship coming up. The data centre manager yelled out “they’ve gone again”. I peered at the ship and noted the large sweeping radar antennas doing their thing. I had to wait another day or two, but it became apparent that every time one of the Navy’s ships went up or down the river the computers would crash. It was a fortuitous catch by me but nevertheless I looked golden in front of the client. A bit of Faraday shielding and all was good.

sibeen said:

This story reminds me of a job I had over twenty years ago, in Newcastle from memory. A data centre was experiencing intermittent server shutdowns. There was no apparent pattern in the times they’d go tits up and I was called in to investigate. I placed test equipment around the facility, peered under floors, into roof spaces, checked all the wiring etc.

I’d been there two or three days. There had been a few incidents, but I hadn’t captured anything on any of the test equipment and was beginning to wonder where I was going with it. I was standing at a large window looking over a river entrance (port) and watching a Naval warship coming up. The data centre manager yelled out “they’ve gone again”. I peered at the ship and noted the large sweeping radar antennas doing their thing. I had to wait another day or two, but it became apparent that every time one of the Navy’s ships went up or down the river the computers would crash. It was a fortuitous catch by me but nevertheless I looked golden in front of the client. A bit of Faraday shielding and all was good.

cars and trucks running into electrical poles can cause computers to crash too, without any UPS in front of them

sibeen said:

This story reminds me of a job I had over twenty years ago, in Newcastle from memory. A data centre was experiencing intermittent server shutdowns. There was no apparent pattern in the times they’d go tits up and I was called in to investigate. I placed test equipment around the facility, peered under floors, into roof spaces, checked all the wiring etc.

I’d been there two or three days. There had been a few incidents, but I hadn’t captured anything on any of the test equipment and was beginning to wonder where I was going with it. I was standing at a large window looking over a river entrance (port) and watching a Naval warship coming up. The data centre manager yelled out “they’ve gone again”. I peered at the ship and noted the large sweeping radar antennas doing their thing. I had to wait another day or two, but it became apparent that every time one of the Navy’s ships went up or down the river the computers would crash. It was a fortuitous catch by me but nevertheless I looked golden in front of the client. A bit of Faraday shielding and all was good.

or mine the harbour

I discovered in one place the PABX and some other important shit seemed to be on the same circuit as the toaster in the kitchen, apparently it was very bad when the phone system was knocked out.

wookiemeister said:

I discovered in one place the PABX and some other important shit seemed to be on the same circuit as the toaster in the kitchen, apparently it was very bad when the phone system was knocked out.

have earth leaks lead to any discoveries

> Petroff narrowed down the possibilities until she eventually identified the source—microwave ovens in the observatory tea room opened while in operation. A test conducted on March 17 confirmed two ovens could reproduce perytons whenever the telescope was pointed appropriately.

Not good enough. Every such signal has to be detected at (radio etc.) telescopes in different parts of the world simultaneously to be accepted as genuinely from outer space. That’s been a principle for longer than I can remember, for at least as far back as 1960. I have real trouble believing that that principle has been forgotten.