How we found the source of the mystery signals at Parkes Radio Telescope (2015)
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
OTH some ovens, like the more modern builtin cabinet microwaves, have an electronic button that shuts down the emitter before triggering the door latch/spring to open.
In any case, the duration and the amount of energy released during the opening motion vs. emission lag will probably not be enough to significantly harm you as dielectric processes need to establish a field to polarize molecules that will heat up as consequence.
Would a microwave burst e.g. fry the speaker of a crystal radio (where the antenna bridges nearly directly to said speaker) which happened to be tuned to a radio-band frequency for which 2.4GHz is a harmonic?
Or, for regulated products like 2.4GHz wi-fi routers, does FCC “accepts interference” testing take microwave bursts into account, or are we slowly degrading some component in them every time we open microwave ovens near them?
Don't microwave ovens in large part depend on standing waves (resonant with the chamber size) to deliver the power levels they do?
Whether it'd do the same with a very short, unfocused momentary burst from reflection inside the oven cavity depends on your equipment I guess. I wouldn't leave my hackrf with RX amp turned on nearby, anyway.
I'd imagine I shouldn't, but I feel slightly vindicated now.
If opening the door shuts down the emitter, then there'll necessarily be a brief period of microwave emission. Even if the emitter's power goes to zero instantly (it doesn't) then the microwaves that have been emitted and are still bouncing around can escape, that'll be quite a few nanoseconds.
I wouldn't worry about it personally. The biggest danger is cooking your eyeballs and a few milliseconds isn't enough
at a previous job I was sitting in the break room with a then-coworker.
A very funny older coworker of ours entered and went to heat something in the microwave. After waiting a couple of minutes he decided he'd crack the microwave open and check on his food.
The machine was old and malfunctioning and somehow the latching mechanism failed and the microwave didn't stop running! The older fellow, being fairly quirky, didn't think twice and stuck his head right in the running microwave to spy on his food.
We yelled in chorus "NO $NAME NO! Get out! Close the door!"
One of the strangest, and funniest things I'd seen at that place (and there had been ...many).
What do you figure a few seconds of a human head in a running microwave would do?
The microwave oven was actually invented by accident when a WWII-era magnetron technician noted that the candy bars in his pocket kept melting.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/a-brief-his...
I have heard that pain will warn you before heat damage is done, at least for realistic power levels and frequencies. And not including the eyes because they have poor blood flow and little feeling beneath the surface. Not sure where I heard that though, so it could be BS.
The goal is to find interesting things in the data, not simply take years of data and return “everything looks normal.”
I wouldn't be surprised if those also eventually were found to be caused by something on this planet.
It could possibly be an atmospheric effect, but even then I think that might still be too close (and thus too large of an angular diameter) to the detector to only saturate one or two "pixels" rather.
[+]: The detector is in the stalk that is above the dish, and signals are reflected off the dish and converge at the focus which is where the detector is placed. So any local source is likely to envelop the entire detector unless it is directly underneath the dish and is a very angle-sensitive effect.
At the time I proposed "yongcat", but it doesn't see to have caught on as it draws a blank on all search engines!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
I saw this as the follow up article on the front page, and it got my hopes up.