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Astronomers Record Mystery Radio Signals From 5.5 Billion Light Years Away
sarahnaomi writes For the first time ever, astronomers have captured an enormous radio wave burst in real time, bringing us one step closer to understanding their origins. These fleeting eruptions, called blitzars or FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), are truly bizarre cosmic phenomena. In the span of a millisecond, they emit as much radiation as the Sun does over a million years. But unlike other super-luminous events that span multiple wavelengths—gamma ray bursts or supernovae, for example—blitzars emit all that energy in a tiny band of the radio light spectrum. Adding to the mystery is the rarity of blitzar sightings. Since these bursts were first discovered in 2007 with Australia's Parkes Telescope, ten have been identified, the latest of which was the first to be imaged in real time.
Now now, we all know vacuum stabilization events travel out from their sources at the speed of light, if it were to happen it would be against the laws of physics to see it coming.
More interesting is one of the actual proposed explanations. A massive spinning magnetron gradually slowing down until centrifugal force can't keep it from collapsing into a black hole anymore. And when the source of the magnetic field suddenly gets cut off from the outside universe by being engulfed by the event horizon, the magnetic field has no where to go but... out. The most powerful magnetic field in the universe getting converted almost instantly to energy; creating a spark that lasts seconds and outputs more energy than the sun has in the past million years.
Never? Really? Wow. There should be a special Achievement just for that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Reasonable nitpick, but yes: "signal" in the signal processing context means a detected quantity whose variations may tell you something. Vibrations in the earth, detected by a seismograph, are signals.