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Cyphase · 5 years ago
Here's the section on FRB 121102 on the "Fast radio burst" Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst#FRB_121102
m3kw9 · 5 years ago
“ within those milliseconds, they can discharge as much power as hundreds of millions of Suns.”

Didn’t know that

sidcool · 5 years ago
That is mind blowing. Our brains cannot comprehend the enormity of it.
muthdra · 5 years ago
But is it the full power of the entire life of millions of suns or the equivalent of what millions of suns produce in a millisecond?
rabidrat · 5 years ago
Power is by definition per unit time.
scns · 5 years ago
Sounds like a Gamma Ray
fhars · 5 years ago
No, radio, the other end of the spectrum. That's why they are called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB). Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) are (probably) something completely different.
xutopia · 5 years ago
If I were trying to let intelligent life elsewhere know that I exist and that I am intelligent I would have to create a patterned noise that distinguishes itself from natural noises that could be formed spontaneously. Talk about a challenge!
yencabulator · 5 years ago
I believe the standard solution is to send a sequence of signals with durations being consecutive prime numbers (multiplied by some unit of time, but that's irrelevant).

The canonical answer ("Yes, I am very smart too") is to reply with a continuation of the sequence where the transmission stopped.

eru · 5 years ago
You could also eg convert the sequence from binary into graycode instead of continuing it.

Just any simple transformation that's obviously not background noise.

jldugger · 5 years ago
Interstellar numbers station.
hindsightbias · 5 years ago
Better than an interstellar microwave weapon
severak_cz · 5 years ago
exactly this I was thinking about :D
aspyct · 5 years ago
The article was nice, but when I hit the back button , the site scrolled to a suggested article and told me "hey, check this before you go".

No, just let me use my back button.

detaro · 5 years ago
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

squarefoot · 5 years ago
> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting

I partially disagree with this rule. Complaining about crappy websites might be annoying for old timers and experienced techies, but let's say a 22 years old fresh web programmer joins HN to read some news and discovers that the framework/library/tool his PM suggested produces a pile of crappy code that renders every site slow as molasses, and the same product is used on a site getting hard criticism about that; he could actually learn something and ultimately find a better solution for his job, ultimately contributing to make a better web. I know I'm taking it to the extreme, but you get my point. I would rather change that line to something like "keep concise and to the minimum all comments about site formatting, slowness etc. and don't reply to those comments unless you can recomment a better solution".

aspyct · 5 years ago
Fair enough, I didn't know. I can't find a "delete" button for my comment though. Where is it?

On the other hand though, I feel like we should always complain about that kind of behavior, if at least to shame the practice and encourage developers to actively refuse implementing those.

cortic · 5 years ago
What a horribly pretentious rule. And the commonality of these annoyances are only compounded by this capitulation to poor design.

Luckily, there is no rule forbidding complaining about rules.

pastrami_panda · 5 years ago
Is there a term for this terrible practice? Should be similar to scrolljacking, but backjacking feels weird... perhaps navjacking?
rapnie · 5 years ago
Not the right term, but certainly a 'dark pattern'. It could be 'button hijacking', though.
amelius · 5 years ago
This comment would be better if it actually prevented me from viewing the article. But it starts with "the article was nice", which accomplishes the opposite.
i386 · 5 years ago
I dislike that comments like this are the top voted comment rather than something insightful about the article’s content itself.
dunefox · 5 years ago
Install a script blocker.
amelius · 5 years ago
Can't you just disable hijacking of the history in the browser?
_nalply · 5 years ago
For me it looks like a source with two rotations, one for the millisecond cycle and the other for the 157-day cycle. Perhaps something is obstructing the source and is rotating around it.
Florin_Andrei · 5 years ago
Magnetar orbiting a black hole or something.
valuearb · 5 years ago
And we know it’s a 157 day orbit.
ccozan · 5 years ago
Could be a tidal lock of a pulsar around a black hole. We only get the milisecond because the black hole is obscuring the burst pointing to us. Otherwise the beam is not pointed at us.

(P)--->---- ( BH ) ----> ( Solar System )

scns · 5 years ago
Did you mean a Pulsar?
Florin_Andrei · 5 years ago
They're all neutron stars. Magnetars are young and make some of the strongest magnetic fields in the universe. Pulsars are old and weak, and make regular beeps if you're watching them from the right place. They're probably on a spectrum, as opposed to rigidly separated categories.

There's a hypothesis that the fast radio bursts like the ones detected here might be produced by magnetars.

avmich · 5 years ago
Reminds Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice.
TedDoesntTalk · 5 years ago
I’ve been reading Lem’s work lately but haven’t gotten to this one. Do you recommend it?
avmich · 5 years ago
Wrote too long a review :) in short words - yes, I'd recommend it, I like it a lot - and know many people who don't.
signa11 · 5 years ago
yup. what a lovely and hugely thought provoking book. specifically on the nature of cognition, and our need to impose order / structure on unknown. which ultimately, is a reflection on ourselves...