this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Space

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Strange 'slide whistle' fast radio burst picked up by alien-hunting telescope defies explanation (www.livescience.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Astronomers watched 35 explosive outbursts from a rare repeating "fast radio burst" (FRB) as it shifted in frequency like a "cosmic slide whistle," blinking in a puzzling pattern never seen before.

FRBs are millisecond-long flashes of light from beyond the Milky Way that are capable of producing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does in a year. FRBs are believed to come from powerful objects like neutron stars with intense magnetic fields β€Šβ€” β€Šalso called magnetars β€Šβ€”β€Š or from cataclysmic events like stellar collisions or the collapse of neutron stars to form black holes. Complicating the FRB picture, a few FRBs are "repeaters" that flash from the same spot in the sky more than once, while the majority burst once and then vanish.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 11 months ago (8 children)

I don't know or care to speculate what it could be with my limited knowledge of astrophysics. However it's awesome how many strange things are still out there.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Space is my jam. More strange things we're still learning about:

There are celestial objects the size of a major city, with magnetic fields so strong they would rip the iron from your blood if it got as close as the moon.

Every planet in the solar system, and many of the dwarf planets, could fit between the earth and the moon, and still have space left over.

Know how crowded our planet is? There are voids in space hundreds of millions of lightyears across, where nearly nothing is inside. The largest we know of currently is the BΓΆotes Void over 300MLY across, and contains only 60 galaxies. For reference, the Andromeda galaxy is only about 2 million light years away, with several smaller galaxies/clusters around us. So take a basketball and put 3 grains of sand inside, that's about how "dense" the voids are.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

only when the moon is close to apogee (Moon is furthest from Earth), otherwise you'd have to exclude Pluto and half of Neptune. https://www.wral.com/story/can-the-solar-system-fit-between-the-earth-and-moon-/16315991/

btw I tried to find diameters of planets and each site says sth different :D

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