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Space Science

Powerful Blast Confuses Astronomers 330

eldavojohn writes "Astronomers are still speculating as to what could have caused an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago when it completely saturated their recording equipment. From the article: 'The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power (10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.'"
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Powerful Blast Confuses Astronomers

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  • Due diligence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) * on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:09PM (#20788697) Homepage Journal

    I heard this story on NPR yesterday. I'm inclined to believe that it was...

    Absolutely nothing.

    It happened one time, six years ago, for less than five milliseconds, and no one else in the world can corroborate that it happened. To me, it sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane that interfered with the measurement for that split second in time. Science is about repeatable, testable, observable results, not one-off flukes.

    Now, having said that, I think it's probably worthwhile to see if it happens again. As the article says, "The astronomers estimate on the basis of their results that hundreds of similar events should occur over the sky each day." If that is the case, then get to looking, and maybe I'll change my mind once they have more evidence.

    Until then, though, let's not get so caught up in the coolness of the possibility of something we've never seen before that we don't do due diligence and make good science.

    • The answer: (Score:5, Funny)

      by JonTurner ( 178845 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:10PM (#20788711) Journal
      God sneezed.
      • by I Like Pudding ( 323363 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:22PM (#20788865)
        Him Bless Him.
      • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:27PM (#20788931)
        The Coming Of The Great White Handkerchief is at hand.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by p0tat03 ( 985078 )

      I admit I didn't RTFA - but if this was an actual reading, shouldn't it have been recorded by *multiple* sensors that are spaced very far apart? What are the odds that all the sky-facing sensors caught the same misreading at the same time? If it's just a single (or a group of local) sensors, then it's probably nothing.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      I'm inclined to agree. A one-off freak occurrence is usually Somebody Else's Fault. Plenty of astronomical events put out this level of energy, but very rarely for such a short length of time.

    • Re:Due diligence (Score:5, Informative)

      by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:17PM (#20788817) Homepage Journal

      To me, it sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane

      TFA:

      The signal was spread out, with higher frequencies arriving at the telescope before the lower frequencies. This effect, called dispersion, is caused by the signal passing through ionized gas in interstellar and intergalactic space. The amount of this dispersion, the astronomers said, indicates that the signal likely originated about three billion light-years from Earth.

      So its not just a burst of noise. It has characteristics which say something about where it came from.

      • Re:Due diligence (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:28PM (#20788941)
        The above poster is correct. If you hear a burst of static on the radio, you might just as easily suspect the radio has a loose wire as you would suspect a distant source of interference.

        However, if you pick up Beethoven's 5th Symphony, the odds of it being the loose wire making and breaking contact in exactly the right pattern are incredibly low...to the point you'd be insane if your top theory wasn't a distant transmitter broadcasting the symphony.

        That's a little extreme of an analogy, but in this case there is also an order to the noise that highly suggests a real signal. Of course, there's orderly forms of interference, too, but most of those can be eliminated by comparing them with the signal.

        I don't understand the comment on the rate. If they've only observed one, they can't make any guesses about the rate. The fact that we saw one looking at only a small portion of the sky suggests the rate is reasonably high, but we don't know how much dumb chance was involved.

        As for what it is, it sounds like they may have ruled out this idea, but I was wondering if it might actually be a much more distant gamma-ray burst that's been red-shifted all the way to radio wavelengths.
        • Re:Due diligence (Score:4, Insightful)

          by NeutronCowboy ( 896098 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:38PM (#20789049)
          How do you differentiate Beethoven's 5th from noise based on a 5 ms sample? You're dealing with a very, very small sample size that has had multiple data processing passes applied to it.
          • by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @07:20PM (#20789429)
            How do you differentiate Beethoven's 5th from noise based on a 5 ms sample?

            If it had been a 9 ms pulse, we'd certainly know which symphony it was.
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by chrisG23 ( 812077 )
            How do you differentiate Beethoven's 5th from noise based on a 5 ms sample? You're dealing with a very, very small sample size that has had multiple data processing passes applied to it.

            Easy. You don't. You differentiate between 5ms of unordered information, or 5ms of orderdered information that resembles known ordered information likely to unintentionally occur when monitoring with the particular equipment you are using or because of uncontrolable shit in the environment (-noun 1. the aggregate of surrou

      • So its not just a burst of noise. It has characteristics which say something about where it came from.

        Can you say with certainty that an equipment malfunction, radio frequency interference, or some other terrestrial source of this signal couldn't produce the same characteristic?

        You can derive a lot of meaning from a single random number if you look hard enough too.

        I'd be more convinced if someone expert in RFI said that this particular signal couldn't have been produced by RFI, couldn't have been been a tra
        • by Dak RIT ( 556128 )
          Well, I'm not an astronomer, but from the article on physorg.com: "The burst of radio waves was strong by astronomical standards, but lasted less than five milliseconds. The signal was spread out, with higher frequencies arriving at the telescope before the lower frequencies. This effect, called dispersion, is caused by the signal passing through ionized gas in interstellar and intergalactic space. The amount of this dispersion, the astronomers said, indicates that the signal likely originated about three b
      • by flappinbooger ( 574405 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @09:13PM (#20790347) Homepage
        Death Star. Luke Skywalker. You know, the movie. Long long ago in a galaxy far far away? 3 billion light years sounds about right!
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by mysticgoat ( 582871 )

      "Do not look in ass end of warp drive engine when it pulses."

      Well, that's a very rough translation of part of the instruction manual. It is about as good as I can do with the limited concepts of mathematics and physics presently available on this rock.

      This concludes our current injection of alien concepts into the Internet through the Slashdot interface. We now return you to your rockbound networks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Korveck ( 1145695 )
      Problem is that such event only happens every so often. God did not create enough black holes to let you observe one die every other day.
    • Re:Due diligence (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NeutronCowboy ( 896098 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:32PM (#20788983)
      I'm inclined to agree. There are very few violent events in Astrophysics that last exactly 5 ms. Even if it's true that the cosmos is vast, and that it is not very likely that someone else was looking at the same exact patch (more like fraction of a pinhead) in the sky at the same exact time, I believe something else should have picked up something. A pure radio radio signal that completely saturates equipment for exactly 5ms? I expect neutrino showers, x-ray waves, visible light - anything, something - to go along with, precede or follow it. Events of that magnitude are messy, and they leave other traces behind.

      There are two possibilities here:
      - Someone got too excited with their data processing software. Some of that stuff was written in the 70s and is held together with spit, duct tape and undergrad students who have never before seen a Fortran77 program, and probably never will again. I don't trust weird stuff that only shows up after heavy duty data processing.
      - Someone picked up a not-so-local radio signal. The atmosphere can do weird things to radio waves.

      Or some aliens were messing around with their cell phones again. In any case, I'll file this under "Postprocessing is a bitch".
      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        Wow. I must have pissed off someone who got mod points recently. This the third straight post that got modded down. Looks like I've ascended to slashdot exalted status - I've got my own nameless stalker! Wee!

        Additional benefit of this post: someone will get to waste even more off-topic mod points. :)
    • by bl8n8r ( 649187 )
      It was the echo of the Big Bang bouncing back from the North wall of the universe.
  • wow! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:11PM (#20788723)
    6EQUJ5
  • News? (Score:5, Funny)

    by tringstad ( 168599 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:11PM (#20788731)
    So, something happened 6 years ago, and nobody knew what it was.

    They still don't.

    Where's the fucking news?
    • Re:News? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:25PM (#20788899)

      So, something happened 6 years ago
      Incorrect ... something happened three billion and six years ago.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by istartedi ( 132515 )

      Well, it was 3 billion light years away. That means it was 3 billion and 6 years ago. This has to some kind of record, even for Slashdot. Come on guys, get with it.

    • Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @07:12PM (#20789359) Homepage

      So, something happened 6 years ago, and nobody knew what it was.


      No, something happened 3 billion years ago. An instrument recorded it six years ago. Someone re-analyzed the data recently, and discovered something they couldn't explain. They published a paper yesterday.

      Where's the fucking news?

      The "news" is that there's likely something very big going on we don't understand. It's kind of sad that you and others only think it's news once we understand what's going on. Science isn't just the end product you read about in textbooks. It's a process by which we understand the universe. This is part of that process, and if this isn't just radio interference, it's extremely interesting.
  • by suso ( 153703 ) * on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:15PM (#20788791) Journal
    Praxis?
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by XanC ( 644172 )
      Praxis is their key energy production facility...
    • Praxis?

      Nah, obviously Praxis' detonation would have created a much broader spectrum of radiation over a much longer duration. I'd say offhand that it was some poor space-traders' ships' warp engine with malfunctioning antimatter injectors, experiencing a warp-core collapse. Let's just hope the poor slob was able to jettison the core before the collapse, or there'll be some *very* well-done tribbles floating in interstellar space!

      Cheers!

      Strat
  • by QuickFox ( 311231 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:19PM (#20788833)

    an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago
    You know that research into time machines is finally making progress when you get to read combinations of past and future tense like in this report about an event that is to be detected six years ago.
    • There is nothing grammatically incorrect or even illogical about that sentence. The subject is an event that occurred in the more distant past which would have caused the 6 year old burst.
    • But was it detected? Or wasn't it? The suspense is killing me!

      It it was "to be discovered" six years ago, surely we'd know if it actually was by now.
  • by Chemisor ( 97276 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:19PM (#20788835)
    "Die, spammer, die!"
  • by sunwukong ( 412560 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:28PM (#20788937)

    The amount of this dispersion, the astronomers said, indicates that the signal likely originated about three billion light-years from Earth.
    Lesse, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away ...

    Deathstar I or II?
  • I felt as though millions of voices cried out in terror and they were silenced. Somehow I thought it came from the incinerator that handled the ballots on Florida. But ...
  • by viking80 ( 697716 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:40PM (#20789065) Journal
    (10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.'"

    This is basically
    1. 1 sun-month (power of the sun 4x10^26W for a month), or
    2. 0.5% of a supernova
    • by spoonist ( 32012 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:49PM (#20789147) Journal
      Hmmm.... yeah.... but what's that in Libraries of Congress??
      • I prefer football fields of Hiroshima bombs as a unit of energy:

        Little Boy was 3m x 0.7m for an area of 2.1m^2. It released 12kt of energy (1kt = 4.184E12 Joules)
        A football field is 109.7 x 48.8m for an area of roughly 5353m^2

        Thus, a football field could contain 2549 Hiroshima bombs; at 12kt each, that equals 30588 kt.

        30588 x 4.18E12 J = 1.27857E17 J

        Thus, 1 football field of Hiroshima bombs is about 1E17 Joules.

        So, this event produced 1E33J, which is 1E16 football fields of Hiroshima bombs. Now that's a big
      • by Quixote ( 154172 ) * on Friday September 28, 2007 @07:41PM (#20789667) Homepage Journal
        Glad you asked.

        E = mc^2 ; so m = E/c^2 .
        Plug in 10^33 for E, and 3x10^8 for c.
        You get m = 11111111111111111 Kg.
        Assume each book in LoC weighs on average 2Kg to simplify things.
        At last count the LoC had about 20M books.
        Dividing 11111111111111111 by (20,000,000 * 2), we get 277777777.
        In other words, this was equivalent to 277 million libraries of Congress.
        // E&OE
      • Hmmm.... yeah.... but what's that in Libraries of Congress??
        Don't you mean Liberaries of Congress per War of 1812?

        I mean, how many books would the British have to burn to generate this much energy?
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        Hmmm.... yeah.... but what's that in Libraries of Congress??

        This is how you get a job at Google: The Library of Congress has 30,000,000 books. Assume each book weighs 1 kg. Then the explosion's mass equivalent would be approximately equal to several billion [google.com] Libraries of Congress. It's almost like that Oprah episode where everyone gets a car. Every human being on the planet gets a Library of Congress. YOU get a Library of Congress! YOU get a Library of Congress! EVERYONE GETS A LIBRARY OF CONGRESS!
      • by shrikel ( 535309 )
        Sorry, you've got the dimensions wrong. This is ENERGY. Libraries of Congress are INFORMATION or TEXT. The proper unit here is Bonfires of Congress. But I'm not sure that will be adopted as an SI unit anytime soon, given how book-burnings are rather out of vogue these days.
  • Aliens (Score:3, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:48PM (#20789133)
    That was a ping from an alien civilization. Since we didn't answer, they have classified our solar system as uninhabited by intelligent life and won't bother trying again.


    Aliens: "Nothing to see here. Move along."

  • Radar chirp (Score:3, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:55PM (#20789207)
    Perhaps the signal was manmade. And if the signal saturated the detector, then it's even harder to judge the waveform and deduce what caused it. TFA says the frequency shifted during the pulse. That's not uncommon in the pulses used in radar which may been on a passing plane or satellite. Even if the frequency bands are different, the harmonic effect means that a strong source of one frequency may appear as a weak source of a different frequency. Either that, or someone made microwave popcorn on a lonely night and wouldn't confess.

    Of course, I've not seen the data and IANARA.
    • I'm not a radar engineer (But I have taken some classes on radar principles). I don't see any mention of what frequencies it was, which I'm sure would rule it out as a radar. But I see a few ways they could eliminate as a radar.

      The biggest indicator is likely the shape of the pulse. Even in the best square wave there's a rise time and fall time (the time it takes to go from 0 to 1). However there won't be the same shape when its just sliding frequencies. If you graphed amplitude vs time for thin cross
  • by sker ( 467551 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:56PM (#20789221) Homepage Journal
    I picked up the same thing on my instruments.. it was just a video clip of Hitler introducing the 1936 Olympics... that's all. Nothing to see here. Move along.
  • No mystery (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was only the end of a war.

  • The assumption likely is that the energy is radiated in all directions. This puts the power varying as 1/d^2 which is a very small number when d gets rather large. The consequence of this is that if we get a signal of magnitude "x" then one would infer from this assumption that one must multiply by d^2 in order to calculate the energy at source.

    If this energy was focused as it is say by a laser then the original power can be considerably lower. A parabolic lens will also focus the radiation but not nearl
    • If the object releasing the energy is rotating. This happens in pulsars, for example, and should happen when a massive rotating star collapses into a black hole, and in astrometric binary stars (when only one partner is actually a star, the other is a dead star), with an accretion disk.
  • You know those spectacular space battles you've been watching on TV all the time? Well now you know what happens when an Imperial huge-mega-ultra-destroyer-obliterator fires... and misses. Some poor planet thousands of light years away gets powdered to dust. We're lucky that was a shot from a tiny-wee-shuttle, from thousands of years away these cause just a 5 ms blip.
  • It was a stargate Wormhole beam now we have a way to cover them up now that we now what to look for.
  • Was the moon, by chance, anywhere in that area of the sky, and was there a monolith present?
  • The matrix was resetting, duh.
  • it was a doomsday weapon destroying a nearby race of beings.

    we're next. let's see jesus and mohammed and buddha band together and fight off the aliens.
  • Obvious (Score:2, Funny)

    by Ryandor ( 648907 )
    ...as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

    (I can't believe no one accurately posted that one yet)
  • Z-Machine (Score:2, Informative)

    by bdkraem ( 1141653 )
    Makes the Z-machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine [wikipedia.org] look like nothin.
  • by autophile ( 640621 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @11:49PM (#20791115)

    After the blast, astronomers from universities across the country were seen wandering dazedly through the halls and campus greens. The sky-gazers did not seem to know where they were, nor what they were doing there. Some astronomers were found in a parking lot below Mt. Palomar, with car keys in their hands, unable to locate their own vehicles. Some had to be given emergency oxygen because, not knowing their altitude, they had forgotten their oxygen masks.

    Emergency psychiatrists were called in to deal with the situation.

    "I've never seen anything like it," said Dr. Itznada Seegar of the Federal Emergency Psychiatric Adminstration. "These astronomers are, to put it in layman's terms, dazed and confused. You can use that movie reference, right?"

    Dr. Adeep S. Komplacs posited a new cosmic psychic ray. Surrounded by clouds of THC byproducts, he remarked, "I've heard of cosmic rays, but this was one cosmic cosmic ray, dude!"

    As things slowly return to normal, said one Astronomy Department head, "Thank God the effect is wearing off. Now we can get our astronomers' heads back in the clouds."

  • by Fleetie ( 603229 ) on Saturday September 29, 2007 @08:52AM (#20792685) Homepage
    Fuck me; isn't there any way to filter out ALL comments modded "Funny"? Because they aren't "funny"; they're asinine, and indicative of people who DON'T understand the present subject, and can only grunt like pigs. This is interesting; so STOP with the "funny" comments already. Fuck, and I thought this was a forum for people with some intelligence and knowledge. I thought I was going somewhere interesting, and I wandered into a pig farm, and now I'm stinking and covered in shit and have gruntinnitus. Free clue: If you're intending to post something with the hope that it be modded "funny", then STOP NOW, because you're a sad 'tard that needs at least a damn good kicking, and possibly a bullet in the head - or to escape that, go out and get yourself a fucking girlfriend.

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