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timeinput
potatoman22
> The telescope consumes 250 kilowatts of power.
250 toasters.
pithon
Which is not a small amount- around 140 of your standard 15A home circuits in the US with 120V service. And this is listening, not a transmitter.
TheOtherHobbes
It's a small amount compared to the 100MW of a larger data centre.
pstuart
> The telescope consumes 250 kilowatts of power
A better investment than bitcoin, IMHO.
dmos62
Bitcoin's efficiency is not relevant to the discussion. Every other comment about energy consumption pulls replies with complaints about Bitcoin mining. It brings nothing new, it distracts from the topic, generally lowers the quality of the discussion. Don't do it. If you must vent, do it where it's on topic.
idiotsecant
Why start this discussion. It's slightly expediting the heat death of the universe for no reason. Are you trying to eliminate all order in the universe???
bequanna
A silly argument. Electricity isn’t finite and we can essentially generate as much as is demanded.
lwansbrough
You can’t even make the Bitcoin transaction that investment would require for that pathetic energy usage.
uncletammy
As if "bitcoin investors" actually make transactions! If they did, it would matter that the network isn't functional
timeinput
I completely agree. I think it makes sense when they have 256 processing nodes with GPUs plus everything else, just the number caught me off guard at first.
willis936
I work on a plasma confinement device that has a linear regulator in its 100 kV gyrotron power supply that uses 6 kW just to keep the filament warm. The coils use 10 MW during a shot. And this is considered a small machine.
Science takes power.
CuriouslyC
My vote is that these aren't bursts, so much as constant directional radiation that we infrequently intersect.
DrBazza
Multi-messenger observations will eventually solve this, e.g. a correlation with LIGO, if the sensitivity is good enough and they're 'low mass' collisions.
The energy needed for these signals already narrows down the category of objects it could be. As the article says, neutron star collisions and mergers, magnetars, and of course black holes.
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miika
If there were space crafts jumping into warp speed or shit like that, then how that would look like?
Imagine if FRB’s were signs of cosmic traffic it would certainly change “life out there” conversation :)
RobertoG
Something like that was in HN two days ago:
Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431999
drclau
Jumping to warp speed is the optimistic case. Here's a pessimistic case: weapons. Maybe we're seeing signs of space faring civilisations at war.
8bitsrule
> Now CHIME has reversed that trend, he says, “I don’t think theorists will catch up with us.”
Funny stuff. I like to imagine they're virtual galaxies resulting from perturbation theory of gravity field theory. With ordinary galaxies described in terms of exchanges of virtual galaxies. Of course, they wouldn't necessarily carry the same mass as the corresponding real galaxies.
foobaw
Will we ever find out what this actually means in our lifetime?
pixel_tracing
Aren’t these just quasars? Not necessarily anything that special. Are people thinking this is extra terrestrial communication of some sort?
_Nat_
Nope, fast-radio-bursts (FRB's) aren't commonly attributed to quasars.
From ["Not all fast radio bursts are created equal"](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03894-6), 2020-01-06:
> Curiously, because the luminosity of a typical quasar is not dissimilar to the peak luminosity of an FRB, we cannot yet completely discount the involvement of supermassive black holes. But Marcote and colleagues’ results argue against that possibility, and the timescales for quasar variability are more likely to be days to months than milliseconds.
Wikipedia has a [section on hypotheses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst#Origin_hypoth...).
colordrops
The article says otherwise.
King-Aaron
Correct, and it is pretty special to learn that (while still rare), they're far more common than we initially thought
steve_adams_86
I agree. As a child I thought these would be extremely rare. In my naive little kid brain I guess I figured there must be only a handful of them known to exist, and I had endless ideas about how such a rare and unique celestial entity must have alien origins. Haha.
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dvh
I favor "asteroid falling on the neuron stars" theory. Both are common and it would also explain periodical ones.
midrus
I just imagined how a neuron star would look like. Creepy.
idiotsecant
That must be a heck of a big asteroid.
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darepublic
[flagged]
rcurry
Thank you, on behalf of all Alpha Centaurians I’d just like to assure you that the regular monthly deposits to your account will continue.
scotuswroteus
I'm out here reading what I imagine is the blog operated by one of the most preeminent journals in the English language. Then I read a sentence that uses the word "tizzy." Illusion, shattered.
dang
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
broberts01
What is wrong with the word "tizzy"?
tkzed49
maybe they think that using high-level vocabulary is an indicator of intelligence. Fortunately, the article does that too.
arthurcolle
Haha this is the best comment so far. Check mate, atheists!
arthurcolle
Imagine not knowing the word "tizzy"
neom
Not sure tizzy is common outside of commonwealth countries. I'm quite sure it's British English.
Fezzik
I’m USA born, have lived here my entire life, and have known what “being in a tizzy” meant since… 4th or 5th grade? I thought it was a relatively common word/phrase. I do read books though, but nothing fancy. Our literacy standards are apparently spiraling downward.
GolDDranks
Uh, I didn't know it. Apparently it means "a state of nervous excitement or agitation".
arthurcolle
It's fine to not know it. It's absurd to judge the merits of an article based on not knowing a word it uses. I mean seriously - you're going to judge an article based on a word YOU happen to not know? Farcical to the extreme.
Made me feel like I'm in that movie from the 90s, "Dexter's Lab Ego Trip" when they are using square wheels instead of circles.
gremlinsinc
Imagine getting in a "tizzy" about journalists using the word "tizzy"... that's irony for ya.
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dd444fgdfg
definitely aliens then.
I mean, surely it's obvious, these bursts are just inter-galactic radar.
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I hadn't read about the CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) telescope before.
From the wikipedia article:
> The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster.
that's super interesting. My limited exposure to radio astronomy relies on a lot more custom collection hardware (super cooled LNAs, with hydrogen maser clocks, ...) and mostly pure software processing. Seeing this very COTS hardware with careful processing systems is neat.
> The telescope consumes 250 kilowatts of power.
woah.