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The Mystery of the Intergalactic Radio Bursts
Time ^ | July 5, 2013 | Michael D. Lemonick

Posted on 07/06/2013 4:54:09 AM PDT by NYer

It’s a recurring theme in astronomy: observers see a blast of energy out in the cosmos, scratch their heads in confusion for a while, and finally uncover the existence of something entirely surprising and new. It happened with the quasars (now known to be gigantic burps from black holes swallowing hot gas), the pulsars (fast-spinning neutron stars sending out blips of radio noise hundreds of times every second), and even the Big Bang itself, first seen as a stream of microwaves slamming into Earth from all directions, nearly 14 billion years after the event itself.

Now it may be happening again. Back in 2007, astronomers detected a burst of radio noise, lasting maybe a second or so, the cause of which was totally unclear. There was reason to suspect it came from beyond the Milky Way, and must be extremely powerful to be visible at all. But it never repeated, and neither did a second, similar blast seen in 2011, making it very tough to puzzle out what was going on. Maybe both events were just some sort of rare fluke.

But a new paper in Science makes that seem very unlikely. Using the giant Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers have recorded four more of these mysterious bursts, and when the scientists extrapolated across the entire sky, they concluded that perhaps 10,000 of these blasts are popping off every day, all over the heavens. “It’s still a mystery what they are,” says lead author Dan Thornton, of the University of Manchester, in the U.K. “But at least it’s not a mystery that they exist.” In fact, Thornton and his co-authors claim that the observations reveal what he calls a “new cosmological population” of energy blasts, whose true nature is unknown.

(Excerpt) Read more at science.time.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: astronomy; galaxy; radio; stringtheory
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1 posted on 07/06/2013 4:54:09 AM PDT by NYer
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To: SunkenCiv

DR JON HERAS /SCIENCE PHOTO / CORBIS

Illustration showing the absorbance of electromagnetic waves by the Earth's atmosphere.

2 posted on 07/06/2013 4:54:31 AM PDT by NYer ( "Run from places of sin as from the plague."--St John Climacus)
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To: NYer

3 posted on 07/06/2013 4:59:57 AM PDT by Vaquero (Don't pick a fight with an old guy. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.)
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To: NYer
http://www.climatecentral.org/what-we-do/people/michael_lemonick/

Michael D. Lemonick

Editorial

Senior Science Writer
Email: mlemonick@climatecentral.org
Google+: View Profile

Mr. Lemonick covered science and the environment for TIME magazine for nearly 21 years, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories, and has also written for Discover, Scientific American, Wired, New Scientist and The Washington Post. Lemonick is the author of four books, and a cover story for TIME was featured in the anthology “Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007.” He has taught science and environmental journalism at Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and New York Universities.

He holds a Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University.

4 posted on 07/06/2013 5:12:52 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
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To: NYer

Nice picture, thanks. I think the word you are looking for is “absorption” or maybe attenuation.

The interaction of radio waves with the atmosphere is highly dependent on angle of incidence, rainfall and time of day. For instance, during daylight hours, AM radio waves are absorbed in the stratosphere, making AM daytime radio a local medium. At night when the stratosphere deionizes, AM radio zips right through the stratosphere, to ionosphere, which looks like a highly polished mirror to AM and signals can travel half way round the globe. (WBZ-AM 1030 Boston has been received in New Zealand, for instance.)

Anyway, believe it or not, it’s more complicated than that simple picture.


5 posted on 07/06/2013 5:13:41 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Doing the same thing and expecting different results is called software engineering.)
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To: NYer
One article pertaining to this phenomenon states that the radiation is both "coherent" and "relatively broadband." I'm having a hard time picturing how radiation can have these two characteristics simultaneously unless it is a modulated carrier.

Also, the above-referenced article states that the bursts have a wavelength of about 1 meter (300 MHz) and have been observed to repeat at intervals of 77 minutes.

6 posted on 07/06/2013 5:15:28 AM PDT by Steely Tom (If the Constitution can be a living document, I guess a corporation can be a person.)
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To: NYer

There are hundreds of millions of galaxies and billions of planets. That is an immensity that is beyond the conceptual concept of most people. It is logical to assume that the universe teems with life. Yet given the huge distances separating these platelets and the laws of physics, it is simply not possible for an alien biological or a mechanical entity to visit. However Earth has been transmitting huge amounts of digital alogarithmic data for the past twenty five years. It is not inconceivable that within the next twenty some computer on earth will receive a truly wondrous communication.


7 posted on 07/06/2013 5:16:07 AM PDT by allendale
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To: Texas Fossil

IOW, he’s a dilettante, like Al Gore. The article was mildly provocative, but not particularly informative. He does give the impression of not really understanding what he is talking about.


8 posted on 07/06/2013 5:16:32 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Doing the same thing and expecting different results is called software engineering.)
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To: NYer
"Run from places of sin as from the plague."

Yes. And decadence is a place of sin.

The decadent do not even believe that there is such a thing as sin, so lost are they.

9 posted on 07/06/2013 5:21:29 AM PDT by Savage Beast (The forces of decadence are the forces of evil.)
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To: allendale
It is logical to assume that the universe teems with life.

Except for the single irrefutable fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere except earth. Not a single piece of data.

Now I GET that our ability to search for life is limited by technology to a certain sphere but that doesn't change the fact that we have no evidence for life anywhere else.

10 posted on 07/06/2013 5:26:08 AM PDT by johniegrad
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To: Steely Tom
One article pertaining to this phenomenon states that the radiation is both "coherent" and "relatively broadband." I'm having a hard time picturing how radiation can have these two characteristics simultaneously unless it is a modulated carrier.

Doesn't seem to be the same phenomenon. The article is dated prior to the discovery of the sources in the Time article and refers to sources in the center of the Milky Way, not extra galactic sources.

The article did not say that the sources were "broadband", but occurred over a very large bandwidth. I take that to mean that any single source is coherent, i.e., narrowband, but the population includes sources at various wavelengths. (For objects within the Milky Was, it is unlikely that Doppler shift could cause very large Doppler shifts.)

11 posted on 07/06/2013 5:30:14 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Doing the same thing and expecting different results is called software engineering.)
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To: NYer

...Its a super-galactic submarine single ping alert.


12 posted on 07/06/2013 5:40:29 AM PDT by spokeshave
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
Your last paragraph offers a valid interpretation that I overlooked. Thank you.

I should not have paraphrased material from the article I referenced. Here is the exact quote:

One important clue to understanding the origin of the radio bursts is that the emission appears to be “coherent,” Hyman said. “There are very few classes of coherent emitters in the universe. Natural astronomical masers — the analog of laser emission at microwave wavelengths — are one class of coherent sources, but these emit in specific wavelengths. In contrast, the new transient’s bursts were detected over a relatively large bandwidth.”

The "Hyman" referenced here is Dr. Scott Hyman, professor of physics at Sweet Briar College.

I would just say - in my own defense - that I can't figure out how they could have detected "coherence" without getting fairly high-res spectral information from the signals.

13 posted on 07/06/2013 5:40:35 AM PDT by Steely Tom (If the Constitution can be a living document, I guess a corporation can be a person.)
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To: allendale
Yet given the huge distances separating these platelets and the laws of physics, it is simply not possible for an alien biological or a mechanical entity to visit.
Gee, how convenient. We earthlings are limited by technology, so all others must be as well.
Perhaps the real reason we have no visitors is because there are NO visitors in the universe.
14 posted on 07/06/2013 5:44:05 AM PDT by oh8eleven (RVN '67-'68)
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To: Steely Tom

If a signal has a relative bandwidth of 1% I’d call it coherent. It could have a lot of noise modulation, or whatever, but that’s still coherent to me. Good commercial RF sources have RMS bandwidths in parts per trillion, but for a natural source to exhibit 1% relative bandwidth is provocative.


15 posted on 07/06/2013 5:50:10 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Doing the same thing and expecting different results is called software engineering.)
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To: johniegrad

Your theory has no real basis because it is impossible to know what we don’t know. That is especially true if 99.9% of human knowledge is excluded


16 posted on 07/06/2013 5:56:00 AM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... Who will shoot Liberty Valence?)
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
If a signal has a relative bandwidth of 1% I’d call it coherent. It could have a lot of noise modulation, or whatever, but that’s still coherent to me. Good commercial RF sources have RMS bandwidths in parts per trillion, but for a natural source to exhibit 1% relative bandwidth is provocative.

I accept your reasoning.

To me, having been raised in the age of lasers (I was in kindergarten when Ted Maiman announced his sensational ruby laser) I've always thought of "coherence" as being something involving parts-per-million stability.

I can see how, when one considers galactic distance and time scales, that is an unrealistic standard.

If nothing else, relative bandwidths on the order of 1% indicate a very high "Q" somewhere in the transmission chain. High "Q" in turn indicates that large amounts of electro-magnetic energy are being stored somewhere, somehow.

At least, E-M energy storage is the only cause I can think of that doesn't definitely involve intelligent design.

17 posted on 07/06/2013 5:59:44 AM PDT by Steely Tom (If the Constitution can be a living document, I guess a corporation can be a person.)
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets

Absorbance is indeed what is illustrated. It is the quality of optical density - absorption and attenuation are verbs relating to the process of absorbance.


18 posted on 07/06/2013 6:10:19 AM PDT by stormer
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To: allendale
No doubt. Even if our own galaxy (Milky Way) was all there was of the universe, it would take billions of years to explore all the suns and planets - and that's assuming we will eventually develop propulsion technology to take us around as the Milky Way is over 100,000 light years in diameter and contains as many as half a trillion (500,000,000,000) stars.

Of course, the Milky Way, vast as it is, is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies that are known to be out there...so far.

No doubt that there are many other planets teeming with life out there, some more primitive by Earth standards, others way more advanced. Even the ones that are far more advanced will probably never develop the technologies to make contact with this little outpost called Earth.

19 posted on 07/06/2013 6:12:17 AM PDT by SamAdams76
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets

Yes, I agree.

But look at the length of time he has been making a living writing about things he does not understand. Amazing.

But also remember, this is TIME magazine, the people who put “We are all Socialists Now” on the cover.

It Is All Illusion.


20 posted on 07/06/2013 6:19:07 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
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