![]() More discoveries started trickling in from other telescopes on a somewhat regular basis.Īt last the conversation about FRBs shifted-from whether they were real to Where do they come from? In 2013 four more were found, again from Parkes.įinally, in 2014, there was a report of an FRB from another radio telescope, at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. In 2011 there was a report of a second one, but doubters were quick to point out that this FRB came from the same Parkes radio telescope that the Lorimer burst and the perytons came from. There were, however, some hopeful signs that FRBs were real. JPĪs the years ticked by and no more FRBs were discovered, some astronomers began to conclude Lorimer had found nothing more than an unusual example of one of these perytons. So, a putative celestial object, it turns out, had less to do with humanity’s quest for knowledge than the quest for lunch. That explains why most perytons were seen after the normal lunch break was over, Burke-Spolaor says: “These were people who were really hungry,” impatient, and unwilling to wait. Investigators were able to re-create the peryton signal-by opening the door of the staff kitchen’s microwave oven before the cooking cycle finished. An instrument installed at the telescope to monitor ground-based interference detected three bursts of it at the exact time the radio telescope recorded three new perytons.Ī bit of sleuthing revealed the source. The breakthrough in determining the real source of perytons came in early 2015. She decided to name the signal after “something that was both natural and man-made”-and chose peryton, a mythical creature that looks like a deer with wings but casts the shadow of a man, according to Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings. Now at Trinity College Dublin, Keane was conducting research at the Parkes Observatory when Sarah Burke-Spolaor reported radio astronomical signals there-and Keane was pretty sure that was rubbish.īurke-Spolaor said she observed multiple phenomena like the fast radio burst that Lorimer identified, but they also appeared in the telescope as Earth-based interference might. ![]() But a signal that appears in all 13 is what astronomer Evan Keane calls “rubbish.” By that he means it’s most likely radio interference from a source such as a leaky power line, lightning, or even a cell phone. Normally, a signal from a celestial object will appear in just one of the feed antennas, or another if it’s really strong. The Parkes Observatory radio telescope has one antenna with 13 separate feed elements, each pointing at a slightly different part of the sky. Although what was causing these events was a mystery at the time, she gave them a name: perytons. But because of the way they appeared in the telescope data, she was virtually certain what she was seeing was some kind of Earth-based radio interference. Using observations taken by the radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory in Australia, the same radio telescope Lorimer used to detect his FRB, she found more bursts that looked like FRBs. Her thesis adviser assigned her the task of finding more FRBs. The glitch explanation gained momentum from a paper by a young graduate student named Sarah Burke-Spolaor. Were these so-called Lorimer bursts, as some sarcastically referred to them then, just a technical glitch? It showed in this sentence from my report for that broadcast: “Sometimes, what seems like a remarkable scientific discovery turns out to be an error in the data.” ![]() Even though I did a segment about Lorimer’s discovery on the afternoon program All Things Considered, I was skeptical. When Lorimer’s paper came out in the journal Science, I was a science correspondent at NPR. ![]() A fragment of a pinkie bone found in a cave in Siberia allowed anthropologists to infer the existence of an entire population of humans who walked the Earth around the time of the Neanderthals. It’s not unheard of for one event to kick off a whole new field of scientific inquiry. He predicted there would be many more-but in 2007 he spotted just one. The problem was, Lorimer found only one of these spectacular new events. I likened them to a kind of dipstick for the density of the universe-a turn of phrase my editor loved that also happens to be accurate. If real, FRBs could be used to measure the amount of matter in the space between galaxies. He called his discovery a fast radio burst (FRB), because it lasted less than a second and it was only detectable using a radio telescope. It was a brief bolt of energy so powerful it could reach Earth from a galaxy billions of light-years away. In 2007 an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer reported finding a spectacular new kind of celestial event. If a scientist sees a unicorn, she’ll probably want to see more than one before telling the world about her discovery.
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