Posted on 08/07/2020 7:21:56 AM PDT by Red Badger
Most FRBs originate hundreds of millions of light-years away. This one came from inside the Milky Way.
Thirty thousand years ago, a dead star on the other side of the Milky Way belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy. On April 28, 2020, that belch swept over Earth, triggering alarms at observatories around the world.
The signal was there and gone in half a second, but that's all scientists needed to confirm they had detected something remarkable: the first ever "fast radio burst" (FRB) to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way, according to a study published July 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Since their discovery in 2007, FRBs have puzzled scientists. The bursts of powerful radio waves last only a few milliseconds at most, but generate more energy in that time than Earth's sun does in a century. Scientists have yet to pin down what causes these blasts, but they've proposed everything from colliding black holes to the pulse of alien starships as possible explanations. So far, every known FRB has originated from another galaxy, hundreds of millions of light-years away.
This FRB is different. Telescope observations suggest that the burst came from a known neutron star — the fast-spinning, compact core of a dead star, which packs a sun's-worth of mass into a city-sized ball — about 30,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. The stellar remnant fits into an even stranger class of star called a magnetar, named for its incredibly powerful magnetic field, which is capable of spitting out intense amounts of energy long after the star itself has died. It now seems that magnetars are almost certainly the source of at least some of the universe's many mysterious FRBs, the study authors wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
I’m not saying it’s aliens, but...
One ping only...
Intergalactic skip tracers
Vogons at it again I suppose.
Now if that bastard so much as twitches, I’m going to blow him straight to Mars.
CQ ... CQ ... CQ!
WVU Mountaineers have been on since 2007 !
OLDEST SCHOOL..............
Light travels 5,878.5 BILLION miles in one year...
This signal originated 30,000 light years away...
My guess is it’s battery has died by now....
Thanks for posting...
That movie is a fav. Not much on special effects, but the message is awesome.
It’s happening!
Watched a ‘Making of’ documentary about it. Patricia Neal was interviewed about it, Michael Rennie had died years earlier.
She said they, her and Michael, thought the script was the most ridiculous thing they ever read! The director was angry because they were laughing so much, they had to do retakes on every scene multiple times.
Sci-Fi was looked down upon by ‘regular’ actors as being low-brow work................
photo caption:
Mother in distant region of space:
Jimmy, stop throwing the stick so far. The dog shouldn’t have to go into the Milky Way people’s yard to catch it.
One of my favorite episodes that I remember watching for the first time when I was about 8 years old.
Now they tell us. Ok, 30,000 years from now they'll get our reply. Send it postage due.
Maybe it's an echo from the liberal radio network to compete with Rush that used to have Al Franken. Went belly up quickly. No listeners.
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