
Scientists track down the source of mysterious radio bursts - wglb
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/02/25/scientists-finally-track-down-the-source-of-mysterious-radio-bursts/
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flashman
One of my favourite stories about mysterious signals also involves the Parkes
radio telescope: some of the signals detected during this 'fast radio burst'
search came from people opening a microwave's door without first waiting for
the heating cycle to complete:
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-05/scientists-discover-
si...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-05/scientists-discover-signals-
being-sent-by-kitchen-microwave/6445570)

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userbinator
That's what I thought too, and before reading the article, I guessed "it's a
microwave again".

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bonniemuffin
I wouldn't say they've tracked down the "source", merely the location of the
source. Still, I really enjoyed learning a bit about how they managed to
organize quick notifications to point a bunch of telescopes at a fleeting
event.

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Coincoin
What happens if someone has scheduled time with the telescope. Do they get
bumped? Who has priority?

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antognini
Usually when applying for time on a large telescope there are a few different
categories of time. Most ordinary observations don't have to be done at any
particular time and many of the larger observatories use queue observing for
these targets. There's just a big list of these targets and the observer goes
down the list and observes them one by one.

You can also apply for a "target of opportunity" when you don't know exactly
when or where the event will take place, but there is a good chance that some
event will occur over the next observing cycle. If you execute on a target of
opportunity you jump to the front of the queue. If there's a particularly high
time sensitivity (like for an FRB) then you might even interrupt an ongoing
observation.

Things are trickier at a smaller observatory because they generally don't use
queue observing. What happens instead is that an astronomer is granted some
number of nights and they have the whole telescope for that amount of time.
All you can do then is call them up and ask nicely. Usually they will though
because they get on a paper without too much work. (The most highly cited
paper I'm on happened that way!)

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danharaj
You get to stare at the stars all night? How wonderful!

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antognini
I used to! But permanent jobs are hard to come by in astronomy so I have since
moved on to work in the medical technology industry.

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privong
I didn't realize you had left the field. Sorry to hear that. Dunno if you
remember, but we observed together at the LBT a while back, for one of the
MODS runs. I've enjoying seeing you and your comments around HN – you give
quite good and thorough explanations.

~~~
antognini
Small world! You were at Virginia then, right? I'm glad you enjoyed my
comments! I still feel like I haven't totally left the field yet since I just
graduated in December and I've been working on finishing up a few projects in
my spare time.

~~~
privong
Yep! I was UVa until I defended in mid-2014. Since then I have been a postdoc
in Chile.

Best of luck finishing up the astro projects. And have fun in the medical tech
area – seems like there's lots of exciting things happening there!

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Certified
It has been suggested that some if not most elliptical galaxies are the result
of two similarly sized spiral galaxies colliding:
[http://spacetelescope.org/images/potw1148a/](http://spacetelescope.org/images/potw1148a/)

The most energetic event I can think of would be two galactic core sized black
holes colliding. Has this been ruled out already as a possible cause of FRBs?

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antognini
Yes. The timescale of FRBs is too short to be caused by mergers of
supermassive black holes. In general the source of an event cannot be any
larger than the time for light to cross the source. In the case of a
supermassive black hole binary the light crossing time is of order seconds to
minutes, but FRBs last for only a few milliseconds. This limits them to be the
size of neutron stars or smaller.

~~~
Retric
The accretion disks around black holes merging could act like a really massive
and short lived particle accelerator. However, that's more likely to spit out
a few Oh-My-God particle's than just a radio burst.

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deftnerd
I think they buried the lede here! By combining the ability to determine
dispersion in the signal path and now pinpointing the source, they
recalculated the percentage of matter vs dark matter.

Dark matter makes up 95% of the universe now?!? As the article states, this is
indeed mind boggling. We're missing a BIG piece of our understanding about the
nature of the universe itself.

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infogulch
I think you misunderstood. 95% of the universe is _not-ordinary-matter_ ,
which is split between 70% dark energy and _25%_ dark matter. _This model has
been widely held for years._

This same model suggests that there should be 5% ordinary matter, but until
now we have only observed half of that 5%. This new FMB observation shows the
full 5% for the first time, bringing our observed data to better alignment
with the model.

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levemi
Would older, elliptical galaxy be less hospitable to life? Or would it not
matter? Would there be more GRB's and various other conditions that would
decrease the likelihood of life? Just curious.

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cjfont
According to the article, supernovas occur more frequently in younger
galaxies, and we know these can blow a star's heliosphere away temporarily
exposing all its planets to deadly radiation (which it seems has happened to
Earth before).

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schwarrrtz
Also, stars that are large enough to experience a supernova have shorter
lifespans than our Sun, giving less time for life to develop.

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ComteDeLaFere
The article is good, but am I the only person who noticed the bizarre poll
that's slapped into the middle of it?

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ck2
no, no they didn't

    
    
         "We still don't know what causes FRBs"
    
    

and later on

    
    
         "but it's possible [...] that FRBs come from a VARIETY of sources"

