A Window into New Physics http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/fast-radio-bursts/
In 2007, David Narkevic was using a new algorithm to chug through 480 hours of archived data collected by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The data was already six years old and had been thoroughly combed for the repeating drumbeat signals that come from rapidly-rotating dead stars called pulsars.
But Narkevic, a West Virginia University undergrad working under the supervision of astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, was scouring these leftovers for a different animal: single pulses of unusually bright radio waves that are known to punctuate the rhythm of the most energetic pulsars.
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A Window into New Physics
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Good article. Thanks for bringing that one to attention. :-)
There's some serious dispersion corrections being applied in that analysis. By comparison E@H's dispersion factors are piddling. If the sources have that billion-light-year distance then cosmological expansion is now relevant for signal transmission and of course the information is very aged, so the sources are quite archaic. But they are of a few milliseconds duration and confined very narrowly in angle. That makes the total energy received within the detection sample very small, or if you like involves relatively few photons. So no wonder there is much speculation !!
[ Including that it may just be happenstance co-incidence on the signal record. I'll assume the investigators have done some analysis in that regard and perhaps are quoting with that in mind. ]
As for me, I'll go with a Ravenous Star Beast snacking his way through the galaxies. Nice crunchy neutron stars flavoured with accretion disk topping. These fast radio bursts are the equivalent of a damp squeak before swallowing. :-) :-)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
RE: Good article. Thanks
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I enjoyed that! Very descriptive. :-)
Cheers!
A good read, thanx
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A good read, thanx
Can we detect some of those
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Can we detect some of those FRB with the current search parameters of BRP6?
RE: Can we detect some of
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Alas no. These signals are one-off events by definition. We do those which repeat. Our algorithms would view these burst photons as being in the noise/background.
That's a pretty key point for analysis. The putative mechanisms - bouncing black holes, imploding neutron stars or whatever - aren't going to allow re-runs on the same object. Finito ......
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal