Astronomers Pinpointed The Location Of Multiple Weird Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy

Fast radio bursts, powerful pulses of radio energy of unknown cosmic origin, are a source of endless fascination to astronomers and alien conspiracy theory fodder to everybody else. But while most FRBs discovered to date are one-off events — a single chirp in the interstellar void, if you will — these phenomena got more interesting last year when astronomers discovered the very first FRB signal that repeats. Now, they have pinpointed its location.

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> these phenomena got more interesting last year when astronomers discovered the very first FRB signal that repeats. Now, they have pinpointed its location.
> Follow-up observations in 2015 revealed 10 additional radio bursts emanating from the same region of space.
> the brightest stellar explosions are happening in the dimmest galaxies

Excellent.

Remember the SETI flowchart.

It’s time to check “Is Repeat exactly like original?”

Wots a Gaussian signal?

AwesomeO said:

Wots a Gaussian signal?

Gaussian functions are widely used in statistics to describe the normal distributions, in signal processing to define Gaussian filters, in image processing where two-dimensional Gaussians are used for Gaussian blurs, and in mathematics to solve heat equations and diffusion equations and to define the Weierstrass transform.

Well now you know!

AwesomeO said:

Wots a Gaussian signal?

a bell curve, kinda.

mollwollfumble said:

> these phenomena got more interesting last year when astronomers discovered the very first FRB signal that repeats. Now, they have pinpointed its location.
> Follow-up observations in 2015 revealed 10 additional radio bursts emanating from the same region of space.
> the brightest stellar explosions are happening in the dimmest galaxies

Excellent.

Remember the SETI flowchart.

It’s time to check “Is Repeat exactly like original?”

Although it is amusing, it doesn’t make sense as a flow chart because it terminates at the first option (there’s yes and no and the continuing chain is unmarked.)

dv said:

mollwollfumble said:

> these phenomena got more interesting last year when astronomers discovered the very first FRB signal that repeats. Now, they have pinpointed its location.
> Follow-up observations in 2015 revealed 10 additional radio bursts emanating from the same region of space.
> the brightest stellar explosions are happening in the dimmest galaxies

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/miupr5wroxx26ztf2miu.jpg

Excellent.

Remember the SETI flowchart.

It’s time to check “Is Repeat exactly like original?”

Although it is amusing, it doesn’t make sense as a flow chart because it terminates at the first option (there’s yes and no and the continuing chain is unmarked.)

Exactly. The way that SETI is interpreted by scientific researchers does not make sense. Every single one of those decision arrows has come out of either a scientific paper by a SETI researcher or from a public interview of a SETI researcher.

Yes, a Gaussian starts weak, builds to a peak and then dies off – symmetrically.

dv said:

mollwollfumble said:

Remember the SETI flowchart.

It’s time to check “Is Repeat exactly like original?”

Although it is amusing, it doesn’t make sense as a flow chart because it terminates at the first option (there’s yes and no and the continuing chain is unmarked.)

You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. Every one of the arrows has been used as an explanation for rejecting possible alien signals. eg.

Signal too strong – Drake’s initial rejection of radio signal from Epsilon Eridani.

Signal too weak – Explanation used in the scientific paper that analysed radio bursts from SETI @ Home, despite some radio bursts being hundreds of times too powerful to be explained as statistical outliers.

Signal Gaussian – both for and against used as a a rejection criterion for signals received by Aricebo. A constant source signal should build and die as the Earth turns the telescope’s pointing direction first towards and then away from the source. Also a criterion used in Seti @ home.

Signal not still there – used to reject the Wow! signal and HD 164595.

Repeat exactly like original – used to reject LGM-1 and SHGb02+14a

Repeat not exactly like original – used to reject the best pre-SETI@home signal (Can’t remember the name)

SETI has been hacked – discussed in scientific papers as a criterion for rejecting all signals that pass all other criteria.

Remember “We receive promising candidate signals every night” by SETI researcher Vakov (2015).

That flowchart needs updating.

Could you use line of sight between our sun and another sun and have a massive object in between than you can use to block our view of the other sun at will and use it as a signal

Cymek said:

Could you use line of sight between our sun and another sun and have a massive object in between than you can use to block our view of the other sun at will and use it as a signal

No. For that to happen the “massive object” would have to be almost as big as a planet, which makes it unwieldy – expensive and slow.

Better to send a narrowband signal (saves power and adds uniqueness) over a short period of time from an empty part of the galaxy.