radio

One of the world's great radio telescopes isn't hearing voices – for the first time another giant dish has picked up one of the mysterious "fast radio bursts" (FRBs) that have been puzzling astronomers at the Parkes Radio Telescope. The find confirms these bursts indeed come from outer space, but beyond that their source is still wide open.

Last year the astronomers reported four bursts picked up by the celebrated Australian telescope. As each FRB lasted around a millisecond there was no time to have other telescopes check the same location, and the fact that no other telescope had picked up anything similar raised the possibility that something local was interfering with the Parkes telescope.

Now, however The Astrophysical Journal reports that the 305m Arecibo Telescope has picked up a similar burst while searching for pulsars. The burst occurred in 2012, but not noticed at the time. "FRB 121102's brightness, duration, and the inferred event rate are all consistent with the properties of the previously detected Parkes bursts," the authors report.

What a bummer! According to Uproxx, the list titled "The approximate list of foreign musical groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions" was created by the Youth Wing of the Communist Party and distributed to radio stations in 1985. It's been translated from the original memo:

Maybe Christmas music isn't so bad to listen to over and over and over...

Scores are calculated like this: 10 points for each week at number one, 9 points for each week at number 2, etc.

Quantifying Everything For Great Justice

Emerging out of the Western Australian outback MWA is a remarkable telescope for radio astronomy where more than 2000 antennas are spread across 3 square kilometers, in 128 groups of dual-polarisation dipole antennas. — John Goldsmith

Most of us at the factory stream music to our bluetooth earmuffs. Then there's the fellow without bluetooth earmuffs but FM radio earmuffs, an in-car FM transmitter-MP3 player, and a USB thumb drive and a joystick power source to spare.