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posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 13 2015, @01:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-macro-waves dept.

According to National Geographic the sources of mysterious radio signals which have been puzzling astronomers for years have been discovered. According to a study by Emily Petroff, the signals, called Perytons, turn out to be from microwave ovens:

But almost since the beginning, one thing has been clear about perytons: Despite mimicking a deep space signal, they're produced by a source that's somewhere near Earth. Astronomers knew this because perytons simultaneously show up in multiple viewing fields rather than arriving from a single point.

In this respect, perytons are very much unlike their cousins called fast radio bursts, highly energetic signals that truly appear to be coming from very, very far away and have no known origin.

Petroff and her colleagues discovered the source of perytons after they installed a real-time radio interference monitor at the Parkes telescope. In January, the telescope detected three of the signals – and the interference monitor picked up three simultaneous interference signatures. The team recognized the interloping frequencies as possibly belonging to a microwave oven.

[...] As one might expect from a cosmological signal, fast radio bursts tend to show up rather randomly around the clock. But, perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect, the peryton data show those signals "clustering near the lunchtime hour."

The study in question is available at arXiv.org, and according to the summary:

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.

Spotted at Scientific American's Physics Week In Review.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by pe1rxq on Monday April 13 2015, @10:59AM

    by pe1rxq (844) on Monday April 13 2015, @10:59AM (#169640) Homepage

    The 1.42GHz is a spectral line of neutral Hydrogen and used a lot in Radio Astronomy. (Among others to map our own Milky Way).
    Microwave ovens are supposed to be operating at 2.45Ghz which is different enough not to cause interference. But it is possible that a microwave tube emits some other frequencies as well when power is being cut off.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday April 13 2015, @05:19PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 13 2015, @05:19PM (#169838)

    You would like to think overload and distortion stats for a preamp are like "infinite" but unfortunately the operating point for an amp that optimizes for lowest thermal noise usually doesn't optimize for best IP3. In other words the most sensitive amps tend not to be the most interference-proof. Sticking a lossy bandpass filter on the input is not likely to help the input noise power LOL.

    Its moderately annoying with ham radio microwave stuff. You drive up to a hilltop during a contest expecting awesome events and someone put a cell phone tower on the hill ruining your preamp inputs even ridiculous frequency difference.

    Everyone knows someone who outright blew out their 1.2 GHz preamp by driving by an airport full of ADS-B transponders operating at 1090 MHz or whatever it is. Beyond mere interference you have burning stuff out.

    Also you'd like to think antenna sidelobes are perfect -100 dB down or something, but again, best overall aperture illumination sometimes means cruddy high sidelobes. You could stick an antenna feed on a dish with really clean sidelobes, but it won't have as high performance as a feed with bad sidelobes. Antenna sidelobes are like your stereotypical flashlight, in theory on paper 100% of the light would go the right way but in reality the mirror is bad enough that you can trivially tell if the lamp is on or off by looking from the side not right down the main beam. And most antennas (all?) are reciprocal so what you can see from it, can interfere with it if its receiving.