Nice enthralling article Trippy. These FRB are from 5.5 billion L/years distant....... Another link..... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/20/gotcha_astroboffins_catch_firstever_realtime_frb/
How about some natural process like this? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/s...ova-and-find-theyre-watching-reruns.html?_r=0 When a supernova goes off, all sorts of signals across the EM spectrum fly everywhere, of course. But a pulsar or a quasar eclipsed in a similar manner might do something like what you described as well, if it were gravitationally lensed properly.
A pulsar maybe, but certainly not an active galactic nucleus. I'd think that lensing wouldn't compress the signal in time, nor would the bursts occur with spacing so close to 187.5 as noted above. Numerologists are working on this right now, I'm sure, but the hell with 'em: Let science step up instead. We'll figure it out.
OK, I've read some more about this. Evidently, the FRB is not correlated with any other observable event in radio, microwave, infrared, visible, or UV. Thats peculiar. But I wouldn't get too hung up on the exact frequency of the burst, because like everything and anything else in the cosmos outside of our galaxy, it is bound to be Doppler shifted, and that would mean the bursts were somewhere in the frequency spectrum vicinity of 187.5. For great interplanetary audio a bit closer to home, there's this: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread301901/pg1 I once thought that some previous recordings of radio signals modulated by the rings of Saturn were the inspiration for the electronic music in the science fiction classic 'Forbiddden Planet', but such was not the case. The music for the film predated the first such recording by over a decade. But the resemblance of the music to some of these recordings is uncanny.
It's not the frequency of the burst, it's the width of the burst. I'm half tempted to get you to elaborate on this as it makes almost no sense in the context of the original article.
For those who haven't already found it in the article I posted in the OP, here's the arxiv paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245
Now that's the horse of a different color. Makes you think about the significance of 187.5. The root is 13.69306394. Very close to the WMAP prediction for the age of the universe. In Earth years. Trippy stuff from Trippy.
When I Googled peryton, I got mythological creatures as the most likely meaning. I'm confused about the use of the word in this context. Help? @Bruce: Why would that particular number be meaningful, except by accident?
Yes. Sorry for my misunderstanding of what I had just read lightly. Kind of embarrassing, for a retired satellite engineer. The really great thing about the discovery of these bursts is that in order to effect such compressed FRB spectra, it is a given that something is actually MODULATING a radio emission. While there are naturally occurring processes that can modulate radio signals in regular ways (aurora borealis comes to mind), it is also true that in order to do this from such a great distance rather strongly suggests an additional element of directionality. Our own SETI transmissions, when they infrequently occur, are tight beams and these are increasingly sent in directions which we know there are planets that are likely to support liquid water and life. But they are also very weak signals compared to these, and it would be fortunate if they were detectable at all from distances of only a few tens of light years. Taking the square root of the frequency dispersion does not appear to be a particularly useful insight. 13.6 billion years is about the age of the universe as determined from WMAP or Planck data alright, but there are many integer and power multiples of that number on the way to 1 billion times that value, besides which this is only significant to us because we happen to have 10 fingers and toes to do our counting before we need to reset. A different radix is very much a possibility not only for extraterrestrial life, but also because even some humans are polydactyls. At any rate, we do not yet understand the nature of some more exotic celestial bodies and events including quasars, pulsars and magnetars. Any combination of these might produce what appears to be a modulated radio spectrum that is more or less regular. Time dilation can also effect some bizarre and interesting radio broadcasts under the right conditions. So, it isn't necessarily ET trying to make contact here.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It's not ET. http://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomical-quest-leads-ovens Origins Of Mysterious Radio Wave Bursts Discovered extract: One clue Petroff had was that all recorded perytons were observed during daylight, and indeed during business hours. When the observatory at Parkes installed a radio frequency interference (RFI) monitor, it picked up signals coinciding with some perytons detected by thefamous dish. This confirmed the local nature of the events and indicated the signal was also occurring at frequencies beyond what the radio telescope can detect. Using this information, 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. Although modern ovens have automatic mechanisms to switch-off when opened prematurely, it seems they don't do this without complaint. “We're still not sure how they are causing this signal,” Petroff says, “It might have something to do with discharge of energy in the oven's magnetron when shutting down.” The demonstration that ovens are the cause of petryons, and that FRB 010724 is almost certainly a real FRB, has been accepted for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It is also available on arXiv.org, with Petroff once again the first author, despite having yet to complete her PhD.
Who would have guessed...., that E.T. was a microwave!... Or hiding in the microwave. There went my laugh for the day. Thanks!
