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.'"
Due diligence (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:The answer: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The answer: (Score:5, Funny)
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The Great Green Arkleseizure.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's a "god"? (Score:5, Funny)
We don't have this phenomenon... (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm loco for logic puffs. (a part of this complete breakfast.)
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Re:What's an "athiest"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even if he doesn't exist, aren't there some pretty good ideas from religions in general? (spare me and cut the seized and butchered religious stuff out of your logic)
If the he in your sentence is the Judeo-Christian God, then that's spelled "He."
So, this is usually, the last defense of someone who realizes that religion is just a coping mechanism, and it might be right. The question is: how would you know? It's not clear to me that if Dr. Martin Luther King were an atheist that he would not have come to the conclusion that peaceful protest was the way to change the world. Same goes for Gandhi and his religion. It's just not clear to me that men aren't capable of the go
Re:Ah, the logic of self-delusion. (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize, don't you, that there's a fundamental difference between shouting "THE SKY IS BLUE!" or "WE DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD, THIS IS WHY YOUR ARGUMENTS ARE WRONG, NOW LEAVE US ALONE!" and shouting things like "If the evidence contradicts my beliefs, the evidence is wrong"? (I know, bad grammar, but I'm too tired to mess with it)
Anyways, "atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color" says it best here. Atheists may have banded together in vocal groups that act in a similar manner (denouncing the gods of others, etc.), but this does not make them religious. Helium [helium.com] has a pretty good little article on this.
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This only makes atheists more comfortable when theists realize that non-believers, the most hated group in America, are not members of a religion or cult.
Nope, sorry.
When you ask a Jew or a Christian or a Wiccan what an Atheist is, they won't say "someone who doesn't believe." They will say "someone who believes God doesn't exist." It's a fundamental difference.
And if you ask a Christian how old the earth is, he might say "6000 years", but this does not make him correct. There is, of course, an argument over the definition of atheism. It seems clear to me that atheism should mean a lack of belief, rather than an active disbelief, but we can use the more exact terms of strong and weak atheist [wikipedia.org].
Science can neither prove nor disprove the Christian God, nor any tenable modern deity. This means that the default answer is "I don't know", not "that's a fairy tale!" (snip)
I'm glad we agree. You can't disprove the existence of anything, but it is quite easy to prove the existence of most things. Unicorns, leprechauns, and Big Foot are grea
Re:What's an "athiest"? (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a label which cultists apply to those who refuse to join their cult?
Windows users.
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s/bit/lot
There, fixed.
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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.
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I am no astronomer but from the article it looks like the problem was that it was a very short burst (5ms) and you needed to be looking at the right place to see it. I presume that current telescopes don't sample at that low rate so they might have missed it or there were looking at different parts of the sky. Also it was totally Baba Gunusha.
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But even with the eggplant, is hummus really capable of such a high energy output?
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Re:Due diligence (Score:5, Informative)
TFA:
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)
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)
Re:Due diligence (Score:4, Funny)
If it had been a 9 ms pulse, we'd certainly know which symphony it was.
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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
Re:Due diligence (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, am not made of money, and I'll stick to shooting at 24fps cameras.
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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
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Re:Due diligence (Score:4, Funny)
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"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.
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Re:Due diligence (Score:4, Interesting)
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".
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Additional benefit of this post: someone will get to waste even more off-topic mod points.
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wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:wow! (Score:4, Informative)
here, I'll make it easy for you.
http://www.bigear.org/6equj5.htm [bigear.org]
Re:wow! (Score:4, Funny)
News? (Score:5, Funny)
They still don't.
Where's the fucking news?
Re:News? (Score:4, Funny)
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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)
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.
News for Nerds... (Score:3, Insightful)
But this is news for nerds, not news for Thoreau.
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I find your lack of humility disturbing. </obStarwars>
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Now being a country with the 6th lowest population density [wikipedia.org] is far more interesting.
Re:Because it's AUSTRALIAN news. (Score:5, Funny)
3,4,5 : medium
6+ : small
It's the standard scientific ranking system.
ST reference (Score:3, Funny)
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I can confirm the location of Praxis, but...
What?
I cannot confirm the existence of Praxis.
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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
Time machines at last! (Score:3, Informative)
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It it was "to be discovered" six years ago, surely we'd know if it actually was by now.
Re:Time machines at last! - OB Hitchhikers quote (Score:2)
Douglas Adams
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Sometimes I get the impression that moderators are joking by giving surprising mods.
It's a message from the aliens: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's a message from the aliens: (Score:4, Funny)
You'd think geeks would know immediately (Score:5, Funny)
Deathstar I or II?
I do know what geeks think... (Score:2, Funny)
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I felt it too. (Score:2)
Confused; instead of donkeys per forthnite etc (Score:5, Informative)
This is basically
1. 1 sun-month (power of the sun 4x10^26W for a month), or
2. 0.5% of a supernova
Re:Confused; instead of donkeys per forthnite etc (Score:5, Funny)
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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
Re:Confused; instead of donkeys per forthnite etc (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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I mean, how many books would the British have to burn to generate this much energy?
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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!
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About 1% is EM (rest is neutrinos). Of that 1%, about 1% of that is in the visible spectrum. From a NOVA episode I think I remembered watching a few years ago.
Aliens (Score:3, Funny)
Aliens: "Nothing to see here. Move along."
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Radar chirp (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, I've not seen the data and IANARA.
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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
Easily explained (Score:4, Funny)
No mystery (Score:2, Insightful)
The assumptions likely don't hold up... (Score:2)
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
Beams can occur naturally (Score:2, Informative)
Star Wars! (Score:2)
It was a stargate Wormhole beem now we have a way. (Score:2)
It's full of stars (Score:2)
matrix... (Score:2)
boooooooooom (Score:2)
we're next. let's see jesus and mohammed and buddha band together and fight off the aliens.
Obvious (Score:2, Funny)
(I can't believe no one accurately posted that one yet)
Z-Machine (Score:2, Informative)
"Powerful Blast Confuses Astronomers" (Score:4, Funny)
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."
Stupid "Funny" Comments (Score:4, Funny)
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Unfortunately the signal was only picked up at one observatory, a fact that suggests an error to me. If it had been independently detected elsewhere, that would be much more intere
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To test your hypothesis, before you go looking for known frequencies, you would probably benefit if you stopped saying things like, "I'm sure there was. .
-FL
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