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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:55AM (#170117)
    Stay in the basement then and don't ever come out. There's a big, scary, source of radiation far more energetic than microwaves that's in the sky half the day. ^_^