Strange 'slide whistle' fast radio burst picked up by alien-hunting telescope defies explanation
Strange 'slide whistle' fast radio burst picked up by alien-hunting telescope defies explanation
The fascinating patterns of 35 repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) reveal new properties of these mysterious blasts of deep-space radiation that appear and disappear in milliseconds.
Astronomers watched 35 explosive outbursts from a rare repeating "fast radio burst" (FRB) as it shifted in frequency like a "cosmic slide whistle," blinking in a puzzling pattern never seen before.
FRBs are millisecond-long flashes of light from beyond the Milky Way that are capable of producing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does in a year. FRBs are believed to come from powerful objects like neutron stars with intense magnetic fields — also called magnetars — or from cataclysmic events like stellar collisions or the collapse of neutron stars to form black holes. Complicating the FRB picture, a few FRBs are "repeaters" that flash from the same spot in the sky more than once, while the majority burst once and then vanish.
I don't know or care to speculate what it could be with my limited knowledge of astrophysics. However it's awesome how many strange things are still out there.
Space is my jam. More strange things we're still learning about:
There are celestial objects the size of a major city, with magnetic fields so strong they would rip the iron from your blood if it got as close as the moon.
Every planet in the solar system, and many of the dwarf planets, could fit between the earth and the moon, and still have space left over.
Know how crowded our planet is? There are voids in space hundreds of millions of lightyears across, where nearly nothing is inside. The largest we know of currently is the Böotes Void over 300MLY across, and contains only 60 galaxies. For reference, the Andromeda galaxy is only about 2 million light years away, with several smaller galaxies/clusters around us. So take a basketball and put 3 grains of sand inside, that's about how "dense" the voids are.
only when the moon is close to apogee (Moon is furthest from Earth), otherwise you'd have to exclude Pluto and half of Neptune. https://www.wral.com/story/can-the-solar-system-fit-between-the-earth-and-moon-/16315991/
btw I tried to find diameters of planets and each site says sth different :D
Learning how empty s[pace is makes me uncomfortable. I watched a Kuzgesagt video last year about how the universe is expanding from all points and we'll never be able to travel to other galaxies.
I just hope one day we create a warp engine of some kind to make interstellar travel possible. Right now it feels like we're marooned on an island surrounded by dangerous ocean.
I completely agree.
Right? The James Webb has taken a lot of what we assumed and just yeeted it out the window, and made me realize how little we yet know about the universe.
It’s never a cosmic slide whistle until you’ve ruled out everything else. This could be interference from Dee-Lite. It could be Sixpence None the Richer. It could be aliens with a regular slide whistle but using an amplifier to make it seem like a cosmic slide whistle.
Everywhere Bootsy Collins goes, cosmic hijinks are sure to follow.
Those darn alien pranksters are ruining the cosmic slide whistle research! 😡
A alien hunting telescope picking up something that defines explanations, is sort of what I expected from alien hunting telescope news, to be honest.
But it is cool nevertheless.
A couple of posts back on my feed was about nasa sending a video of a cat via a laser beam. Can't help thinking they've been intergallactically rick-rolled!
"Sir, we just received a cat video from an unknown source!"
"Sound the Cosmic Slide Whistle! Quickly!"
That would be the coolest.
I am hoping, however, that this is just some dumb shit we did echoing back.