
A Cosmic Burst Repeats, Deepening a Mystery - Errorcod3
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170418-fast-radio-bursts-repeat-what-are-they-made-of/
======
podiki
I am reminded of my favorite part of the whole Fast Radio Burst(FRB) story so
far:

Since they had only been observed at 1.4 GHz, it was natural to think it was
some sort of interference, since that is a busy frequency. Similar events that
seemed to be terrestrial in origin were called Perytons (a mythological bird
[1]) for some reason. This called into doubt that the FRBs were extragalactic,
as claimed.

Then there was this fantastic paper [2] that completely figured it out (itself
amazing). Turns out the "peryton" signals were from a microwave at a nearby
building (lunch area for the lab or visitors) being opened while still on.
There was just a grazing angle with the telescope that didn't block the
signal, and the radio pulse looked very similar to an FRB.

The nail in the coffin? This plot (figure 4 and 7) showing that these signals
peaked around lunchtime! Meanwhile the true FRBs were uniform in time, and so
were not the same and agreed upon to not simply be interference.

[Disclaimer: I wrote a paper on FRBs, but was not involved in that work.]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton)

[2] [https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-
lookup/doi/10.1093/mn...](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-
lookup/doi/10.1093/mnras/stv1242)

or

arXiv [https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165](https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165)

------
graycat
The article kept saying "as much energy as 500 million suns". They lost me: If
they meant "power of 500 million suns", then that's plenty amazing but okay.
But "energy of 500 million suns" \-- wow! Just blew the top off my scale of
credibility. That is, for "the energy of 500 millon suns", take the mass of
500 millon suns, and calculate the energy from E = mc^2 and get a big number,
especially for some radio waves lasting only a few milliseconds.

Of course, with more context, their statement was "powered by as much energy
as 500 million suns", so they were working hard to confuse energy and power.

Eventually in the article I got the impression that they really meant the
"power of 500 million suns" \-- big difference between energy and power e.g.,
the difference between KW and KWh, between Joules and Watts (for people who
like MKS units).

Also likely want to make clear that are assuming that power level was uniform
in all directions from the source, that is, not just _beamed_ in a narrow beam
pointed at earth.

Also of similar interest is an associated article at that site on detection of
a cosmic ray with energy 320 EeV, that is, a well thrown bowling ball.

~~~
zeroer
I thought the same thing. Clearly they meant the power. An explosion with
500-million suns worth of mass-energy would end life on Earth, 3 billion light
years away or not.

------
Errorcod3
"The repeater may have created more questions than it delivered answers."

Difficult to understand as it is irregular with bursts at random intervals.
"After 50 hours of seeing none during previous observations, the team now
spotted them frequently, including, one time, a “double burst” of signals only
23 seconds apart."

~~~
perseusprime11
Occam's Razor: faulty equipment

~~~
boomboomsubban
That only happens when a range of telescopes point at a certain spot in the
sky? It's possible, but by now they've likely ruled out most possible
malfunctions.

~~~
perseusprime11
Could it not be signals from our own equipment/satellites/spy planes/etc?

~~~
winfred
These radio telescopes have a fairly narrow focus and when two telescopes
located on different continents aim at a source several billion light years
away, their focal points do not overlap anywhere near earth, so that rules out
anything on or near earth. You could come up with a theory where it does
originate on earth, but it wouldn't pass Occam's razor.

------
raziel2701
My guess is intergalactic warfare. They can keep their magnetars, my
explanation adds intrigue!

~~~
yoodenvranx
Perhaps we witnessed the birth of a new Chaos God? Or the Emporor did some
maintainance work on the Astronomicon.

~~~
hinkley
Galactic bypass.

------
JauntTrooper
My favorite theory is that they are actually artificial, alien light sails
being used to travel.

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25609/fast-radio-
burs...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25609/fast-radio-bursts-alien-
space-travel/)

~~~
19eightyfour
It seems like 500 Million suns worth of energy ( not totally converted into
momentum -- since we can observe it ) to power a spaceship, by an advanced
civilisation, is a bit wasteful.

I think it's more likely if FRBs are from a civilization they represent
something like the output of an industrial process ( maybe for creating dark
matter or other exotic materials ), or the equivalent of blasting to get
access to minerals, or even a weapon, like a super powerful nuclear or dark
matter weapon. Someplace the expenditure of energy is justified by the cost.
Or maybe it's a race of super-advanced giants playing with enormous laser
pointers just for fun.

~~~
mseepgood
> It seems like 500 Million suns worth of energy ( not totally converted into
> momentum -- since we can observe it ) to power a spaceship, by an advanced
> civilisation, is a bit wasteful.

Wastefulness doesn't stop civilizations from doing something. It could be the
spaceship equivalent of a SUV.

~~~
19eightyfour
Lol. That's good. So true. I didn't think of that. It's more like
"unconscious" nature that is usually more efficient instead of civilizations.
Although I don't understand why some crop genomes have so many more genomes
than humans. Maybe wastefulness is everywhere.

~~~
derefr
Are you talking about polyploid genes? Having more copies of each gene per
cell nucleus is effectively RAID: it protects against copying errors, and
therefore against genetic disorders and cancers. This does have the side-
effect of increasing the size of the nucleus of each cell, which is a problem
if you're an animal with cells that need to float around in a blood stream and
squeeze through tiny capillaries—but not if you're a plant, with all your
cells locked in place.

~~~
19eightyfour
That's also an important consideration I hadn't thought of. The plants can
have the cell size constraint relaxed because of their different morphology /
physiology.

In fact, it came from me looking at human and other vertebrate genomes, and
then looking at some reference "crop" genomes and seeing multiples as many
genes. I didn't know if they are polyploid copies as you say or not tho it
could have been. I'll try to find the links where I saw these numbers (from a
few years ago now) and update.

[edit]

Ok, for example:

chimpanzee genome,
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/202](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/202)?
, size: ~3Gb, scaffolds: ~50k

bread wheat genome,
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/11?](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/11?),
size: ~13Gb, scaffolds: ~750k

And more summaries are at the Wikipedia page of sequenced plant genomes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_plant_genome...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_plant_genomes#Grasses)

( there are many with over 30,000 genes ( cf humans < 20,000 ) and there are a
few big ones ( Aegilops tauschii (Tausch's goatgrass) has 4.3Gb ), and most
are more than 200 Mb ( cf fruit fly is around 180Mbp )

When compared with small insects and animals (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_eukaryotic_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_eukaryotic_genomes#Animals)
) plants often have larger genomes. And in some cases larger genomes than
humans.

The weird thing is that genome size is correlated with "complexity" in non-
animal world too. With fungi and so on having smaller genomes generally than
large plants. All this seems weird because my assumption is that animals are
more "complex" than plants. So either there is a lot of redundancy there or
plants have some kind of unseen complexity. It would be cool to see models
that try to quantify the explanations of large genomes given here by others (
error and viral resistance and freer nuclear sizing ) and see if those models
can account for the sizes somehow, or if there might be more to the picture.

Another possibility is that genomes grow with genetic manipulation so cross-
breeds have bigger genomes. But what does that say for humans? Are we the
result of genetic breeding as well?

~~~
derefr
To put a finer point on it, the limit on cell size is closer to the
definitional difference between what makes something a "plant" vs an "animal"
than almost anything else. Plants, due to their stable tissue structures,
don't need to worry about their cell size, and therefore don't need to worry
about unbounded DNA growth. Because of this, they have evolved to _take
advantage_ of having "more" DNA. Yes, polyploid plants are generally
healthier, because plants expect polyploidy. But even without polyploidy,
plants have large amounts of "specialized-use" genetic material, libraries of
specific responses (e.g. immune responses) to specific problems (e.g.
parasites) that may have only existed millions of years ago. They can just
keep all these one-off solutions around, evolving to protect themselves
against one more thing at a time.

(This is also why plants tend to be full of weird organic molecules like
terpenes, which are _beneficial_ to nearly every animal alive today: those
chemicals probably protected them from _something_ at _some point_ , and the
genes responsible for making them have had no reason to be shut off since
then.)

But animals, with a finite limit on gene-base size, must solve problems
differently. Animals evolve along different lines—polyploid mutations usually
result in non-viable offspring for animal species, because animals frequently
have mutations that _assume_ diploidy, with complex machinery to favor better
vs. worse versions of each diploid gene using silencing or epigenetic
methylation. And more generally, animals evolve solutions to whole _classes_
of problems that have compact genetic representations. We don't have a million
custom immune responses; instead, we have xenograft rejection genes, T-cells,
livers and kidneys, saliva and stomach acid, the sensation of itching, skin
that sheds and skin oil that clears pores, and put together, those mechanisms
handle 99% of cases just fine.

And often we don't need any of those; the primary "solution" that animals have
to almost every problem, is just the ability to _move away from the source of
the problem_. If there's a predator, you can just run away. You don't need to
know what the thing _is_ , to run away from it; you just run away! Universal
solution! To do that, we need a lot of things: not just limbs, but sensory
organs, to know where _we_ are and where _the predator_ is; and nerves, to
link the two; and even some sort of instinct for what predators exist, or
memory to record sense-fear associations. But all those genes _still_ take up
far less space than immune proteases individualized for every bacterium and
fungus on earth.

~~~
19eightyfour
This is so great. Such a lucid explanation. Do you have more writing on bio
someplace? Thanks very much!

------
zeroer
I'm reminded of the quote:

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in
your philosophy."

The universe is amazing and terrifying.

~~~
graycat
"Not only stranger than we suppose but stranger than we can suppose."!

~~~
bveach
Hey there - I was unable to comment on an old post of your for some reason. To
be discreet... Do you still work at the company where you played violin
lessons one night in your office and Mr. Smith heard? :) If so, look me up.
Last name, Veach. I work in GPE. I have a question for you.

~~~
graycat
Naw, I left for grad school a long time ago.

When I was a B-school prof, one of my students was getting a pilot's license
and asked me to contact FedEx for him, and I did. I got a note back from Smith
that FedEx would welcome the application from the student but had a long list
of pilot applications.

~~~
bveach
Dang! Your post was so well-informed. Oh well, if you ever come back, look me
up!

------
mysterypie
What's the difference between these Fast Radio Bursts and the Wow signal[1],
which also seems to be described as a very powerful fast radio signal?

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal)

~~~
podiki
The "Fast" in Fast Radio Bursts is because the signal lasts only milliseconds,
while the Wow signal lasted thousands of times longer, for over a minute.

~~~
drjesusphd
Whoa, really?

~~~
podiki
Yup. If you look on the Wikipedia article for the Wow event, it lasted for the
entire observing window, so that implies it could have lasted longer
before/after. Meanwhile FRBs are quite amazing because they are so quick. It's
a lot of energy in a very small time, which leads people to consider compact
objects as part of the origin (short burst leaves very small distance from the
light travel time for the event to be coherent).

------
varjag
> The light buckets will act like floodlights in reverse, pulling in radio
> waves from a huge swath of sky.

So basically, they are nothing like floodlights.

OK I get it analogies are often important to make science accessible by the
public, but at some point it just becomes confusing atop of incorrect.

~~~
taneq
You mean you wouldn't describe them as basically backwards dark-suckers but in
the radio spectrum?

------
graycat
May I propose: There is (A) a neutron star and (B) another dense object, a
neutron star or a black hole, and the two have an electrostatic potential
between them and are in very close orbits. Occasionally a spark jumps between
the two. If the (A) neutron star is negative, then the spark consists of
electrons. Else the spark consists of protons.

The spark is the source of the FRB.

Wild guess!

~~~
db48x
You may propose it, but wild guesses don't really help. The space of all
possible ideas is far too vast for a random guess to have any chance of
hitting on a physically plausible idea, let alone the correct idea.

I'm no physicist myself, but in this case I suspect that a net electric charge
of that magnitude would discharge continuously, because the electric field
would be large enough to accelerate charged matter away from the surface. You
may have noticed that even our sun produces a continuous solar wind made of
charged particles. It's losing a billion kilograms per second, and it has no
overall net charge.

~~~
graycat
Wild guesses are nearly always junk, but some of the best physics looked like
wild guesses before lots of testing.

I didn't get into just how an object could have a net electric charge, but
IIRC such a state is accepted as possible in astrophysics.

For the FRB being not continuous but only intermittent, maybe the orbit is not
perfectly circular; maybe there are other effects that make the FRB
intermittent.

Science does not start with a testable hypothesis but with intuitive guesses;
the more solid stuff comes later.

In this case, for these FRBs, we know so little that doing solid science has
to wait and all of us can guess!

------
elorant
Is there any sci-fi book out there that describes something similar? Since we
have no clue on what this is I'd be interested in reading far-fetched
theories.

~~~
derekerdmann
"the FRBs were as blinding as flash grenades in a dark forest"

Just that much should be terrifying for anyone who's read _The Three-Body
Problem_ and its sequels.

~~~
mirimir
Yeah, _Dark Forest_ features some disturbing paranoids :(

------
suls
So this thing is located 1 gigaparsec away from us. The article also mentions
that this thing is "probably less than 100 years old". Which then means that
this all happend 3 billion (+/\- 100) years ago but we are only observing it
now?

~~~
pavement

      ...it would take a very special magnetar to unleash 
      such monstrous FRBs in quick succession. “A neutron 
      star bursting at this rate for thousands of years 
      would quickly run out of fuel,” he said. His best 
      guess is that the repeater is a very young magnetar — 
      probably less than 100 years old.
    

Yes, billions of years ago, there was a thing that lasted possibly one hundred
years, but in that time during its existence it emitted radio bursts, and
we're only noticing them right now.

------
cmurf
It's just a bug in the holomatrix of the universe. As we get better peering
behind the curtain, we'll see more bugs and maybe even be able to exploit
them. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

~~~
yourapostasy
One variation on where an exploit of the simulation might lead to:

[http://i.imgur.com/8KrABb5.png](http://i.imgur.com/8KrABb5.png)

~~~
delecti
On the one hand, we sure seem pretty cooperative for a race designed to be
warlike. Though on the other, I can imagine a race to whom we're horrifically
warlike. I guess it's all a matter of perspective.

~~~
zeroer
We're pretty social with other humans. But we tend to treat other animals
pretty shitily. Also, there's serious argument that we committed genocide upon
Neanderthals and perhaps some other early-human offshoots.

~~~
simonh
>We're pretty social with other humans.

I don't think that's an opinion that would survive reading the history section
in a Library for very long.

------
beezle
Hmm... something funky going down in Quemado? Experiments at the lightning
farm? If you haven't done the self-guided tour of the VLA, you've just not
lived yet! Though it was pretty cool seeing the all out there (highly
recommend taking along some lawn chairs and camping out a bit north of Quemado
for some very dark sky viewing)

~~~
ianai
I went to college near there. I really miss being near stuff like the VLA.
Plus every (clear sky) night being perfect for looking up!

