Just where do perytons come from?

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You’ve asked, I’ve asked. Everyone has asked: Just where do perytons come from?

Well, now Petroff et al. are able to tell you. But first – some background:

“Perytons” are millisecond-duration transients of terrestrial origin, whose frequency-swept emission mimics the dispersion of an astrophysical pulse that has propagated through tenuous cold plasma.

Damn that tenuous cold plasma. But, there you go. A peryton is essentially a very short signal detected by a radio telescope, like the Parkes Radio Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. And while we (we radio astronomers, that is) were pretty sure that they were generated on earth, we weren’t sure how. The problem with perytons though, is that they are very similar to Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs. FRBs aren’t generated on earth – so they are of great interest to radio astronomers. It doesn’t help that they may be being masked by perytons.

In their submission to the journal Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, Petroff et al. claim to have found the source of these pesky perytons at their radio telescope:

Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals.

u wot m8?

Yep. It was a someone opening the door of a microwave oven on site before the bing that was causing that blip on a screen.

Awkward.

I’ve never really understood the need to open a microwave door prematurely. What are you going to do with the extra 9 seconds you just “saved”? And do you realise that you could have set radio astronomy back by several years as they struggle to work out what just made all their alien invasion alarms go off? No. No, you don’t, because you only think of yourself, don’t you?

Anyway. Whatever, because they’ve sorted it. I wonder who came up with the premature opening of microwave doors hypothesis? Can you imagine being in that meeting?

E.Petroff (for it is she): So, what could be causing these perytons, then?
Scientist 1: Aliens.
Scientist 2: Aliens.
Scientist 3: (eating recently warmed up braai leftovers): No idea, mate.

Anyway – there is a serious side to all of this. Now that they have had a good look at the microwave oven-generated perytons, they have worked out that one of their FRBs – FRB010724, to be exact – wasn’t caused by anyone in their kitchen and did actually come from way out there in outer space. And that’s quite exciting.

UPDATE: And here’s how they discovered this:

Brilliant. (And am I the only one who sees the middle finger in that graph?)

Wild Frontier

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The new album from The Prodigy – The Day Is My Enemy – is out, and it’s unapologetically bleepy, shouty, loud and beautiful. Already at number 1 in the UK, it seems that Keith et al. have been sorely missed.

Here’s the mad video for Wild Frontier. And yes, that’s a stuffed moose on a motorbike.

Somewhere deep in the past of this blog, I wished for the renaissance of 90’s bands, just as we have enjoyed (or endured, I suppose, depending on your point of view), something of a revival of 80’s bands touring and re-releasing once again. If this album is part of that (and yes, I know that there’s the argument here that The Prodigy never really went away), then I, for one, cannot wait. It’s brilliant. This is one of those albums that will certainly be up there, vying for second place in the coveted 6000 miles… Album of the Year award 2015.

If you want to go even deeper, head for the excellent KillSonik remix (set to Youtube to HD and phasers to stunning).

My photography summed up

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And summed up perfectly too, in this entry towards the end of an epic description of a day out in Bournemouth by diamond geezer:

20:45 Start looking through today’s photos (I appear to have taken 342).
Most are not as good as I’d hoped.

This is exactly the case with my photography – although usually on an entirely different south coast.

But that’s the way with photography today, isn’t it? And at least we have the luxury of taking that number of photographs in an attempt to capture something decent. Remember when you only had 24 or 36 shots for an entire holiday? And the expense of film and developing? That made each photograph precious: from the composition to the actual, tangible image at the end of the process.
That said, despite the fact that they now cost “nothing”, the fact that we’re still chucking 90+% of them away doesn’t speak much for our talent, does it?

The questions remain

Proportionately, are we now or were we then taking better photographs? And then, are our best photographs now better than our best ones then?

Sorry, I don’t think I have a considered answer, although I’d like to think that I’m improving bit by bit.

Meanwhile, talking of that photography, some of it has been Micklethwaited – which could be the catchall verb for “thinned, improved, made more interesting”. Something else that wouldn’t have worked very well or have been anywhere near as straightforward with a physical, old skool photograph.