Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy

newscientist.com

44 pointsinstantramen15 comments

What a letdown. Hype us all up for ET and then spit out that it's probably a black hole.

The universe is a cruel mistress, astronomy reporting, worse.

That way they can attract visitors to the other n articles theorizing as to what black holes are exactly.

Oh, I saw this film! See if they are prime numbers!!

Let's make sure we send a response. Also, leave a note for our ((great-)^$BIGNUM)grandchildren so they know the part of the conversation they've missed when it's their turn to talk.

I vote we send "o rly?", since they're clearly talkin' smack about us, and we're just picking up some joker's over-powered ham radio.

If they reply "ya rly", it's evidently not from an intelligent source, and we start hoping it's a black hole.

> The stuff in these jets is moving towards us at a slight angle and travelling at a fair fraction of the speed of light, and the effects of relativity produce a kind of optical illusion that makes the motion appear superluminal.

Never heard this before, anyone care to elaborate ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_motion

Nice, thanks!

Though this seems to say that this has absolutely nothing to do with relativity, and everything to do with the speed of light. That x years of light can arrive within x/10 years of each other makes it look like it's traveling 10x faster than it is. And if it's already going near light speed, it appears to go beyond that because it's nearly keeping up with its own light.

(for tl;drs / those still confused) Think about wave-fronts collapsing onto a beach zipping away faster than you can run, despite only traveling a few miles per hour towards the beach. Same basic thing, but with light.

Yes. Relativity's "involvement" here is mostly limited to the establishment of an absolute upper limit on speed which is constant (so far as we know) everywhere; everything else is simple geometry.

okay, clear now. actually it was v simple !

They don't mention this, but this "nearby" galaxy is 12 million light years away. To put this in perspective, imagine the Earth and the Sun being 1 inch apart.. M82 is then 12 million miles away on that scale.

Somewhere Jodie Foster just threw off her headphones, jumped off the hood of her car, and frantically went to investigate. She won't find much. (hint: 3-D, not 2-D).

Is a sample of the emission available to the public somewhere? Could be fun to see it and try to guess what it means :)

Probably an iPad order.

It's a message and it says: It is time to rethink the space plan ;)

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