Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope | Hacker News Reader

Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope

arxiv.org

20 pointsxioxox7 comments

Somewhere, in a cold and desolate corner of the world, there is a security shack where the impatient security guard pulls open the door of the dilapidated microwave to get his coffee that much sooner, and researchers at a radio telescope jump at the notion of extra-galactic radio signals.

This was some great detective work, of course one always needs to check if you're getting events that occur more frequently during working hours.

As a radio and electronics hobbyist, what's most impressive to me is the sensitivity of our scientific instruments. Fascinating!

The oven guys selected 2.4 GHz because of water's inherent properties at that frequency.

Not to make light of it, but any ET would have made the same choice for his oven.

That's incorrect. The resonant frequency of water is in the THz range. The selection of 2.4 GHz is due to frequency allocation. The Industrial, Science and Medical (ISM) band is centered on 2.45 GHz. There are also microwave ovens that operate on the next ISM band down in frequency, 915 MHz.

There's not THE resonant frequency of water, there are a lot of them, in different regions of the spectrum, and with different widths, all caused by different mechanism by which water-molecules can interact with electromagnetic waves.

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

And the one responsible for absorption in the ~1GHz region isn't even related to any resonance whatsoever, as it's caused by rearrangements of the unordered electrostatic bindings between the polarized water molecules.

There's even more detail at: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/microwave_water.html

Hot pockets! There's just something about these kinds of investigations that really absorb me. For all the other things going on in the world, I'm glad there seem to be many people interested in this kind of work.

I'm just gonna make some popcorn and watch...

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