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The peryton is a mythological hybrid animal combining the physical features of a stag and a bird. The peryton was invented by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1957 Book of Imaginary Beings, using the fictional device of a supposedly long-lost medieval manuscript.
The peryton is said to have the head, neck, forelegs and antlers of a stag, combined with the plumage, wings and hindquarters of a large bird, although some interpretations portray the peryton as a deer in all but coloration and bird's wings.
According to Borges, perytons lived in Atlantis until an earthquake destroyed the civilization and the creatures escaped by flight. A peryton casts the shadow of a human until it kills one during its lifetime, at which time it starts to cast its own shadow. Some descriptions of the peryton allege that a sibyl once prophesied that the perytons would lead to the downfall of Rome. [1]
The term peryton is also used for radio signals of terrestrial origin that mimic fast radio bursts, pulses that appear to be coming from outside of our galaxy. This was assigned to this source type by the scientist that first identified them in the data, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, because they demonstrated some properties that appeared man-made and some that appeared natural. [2] These perytons were found to be the result of premature opening of a microwave oven door, which releases a frequency-swept radio pulse, which mimics a fast radio burst, as the magnetron turns off. [3]
Perytons have made appearances in modern literature and games.
A strange star, also called a strange quark star, is a hypothetical compact astronomical object, a quark star made of strange quark matter.
Bahamut, or Bahamoot, according to Zakariya al-Qazwini, is a monster that lies deep below, underpinning the support structure that holds up the earth.
Parkes Observatory is a radio astronomy observatory, located 20 kilometres (12 mi) north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia. It hosts Murriyang, the 64 m CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope also known as "The Dish", along with two smaller radio telescopes. The 64 m dish was one of several radio antennae used to receive live television images of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Its scientific contributions over the decades led the ABC to describe it as "the most successful scientific instrument ever built in Australia" after 50 years of operation.
Birr Castle is a large castle in the town of Birr in County Offaly, Ireland. It is the home of the 7th Earl of Rosse and his family, and as the castle is generally not open to the public, though the grounds and gardens of the demesne are publicly accessible, and include a science museum and a café, a reflecting telescope which was the largest in the world for decades and a modern radio telescope.
An astronomical radio source is an object in outer space that emits strong radio waves. Radio emission comes from a wide variety of sources. Such objects are among the most extreme and energetic physical processes in the universe.
A pulsar is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles. This radiation can be observed only when a beam of emission is pointing toward Earth, and is responsible for the pulsed appearance of emission. Neutron stars are very dense and have short, regular rotational periods. This produces a very precise interval between pulses that ranges from milliseconds to seconds for an individual pulsar. Pulsars are one of the candidates for the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
A millisecond pulsar (MSP) is a pulsar with a rotational period less than about 10 milliseconds. Millisecond pulsars have been detected in radio, X-ray, and gamma ray portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The leading hypothesis for the origin of millisecond pulsars is that they are old, rapidly rotating neutron stars that have been spun up or "recycled" through accretion of matter from a companion star in a close binary system. For this reason, millisecond pulsars are sometimes called recycled pulsars.
A terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), also known as dark lightning, is a burst of gamma rays produced in Earth's atmosphere. TGFs have been recorded to last 0.2 to 3.5 milliseconds, and have energies of up to 20 million electronvolts. It is speculated that TGFs are caused by intense electric fields produced above or inside thunderstorms. Scientists have also detected energetic positrons and electrons produced by terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.
The baobhan sith is a female fairy in the folklore of the Scottish Highlands, though they also share certain characteristics in common with the succubus. They appear as beautiful women who seduce their victims before attacking them and killing them.
Astropulse is a volunteer computing project to search for primordial black holes, pulsars, and extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Volunteer resources are harnessed through Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. In 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory launched SETI@home, which would rely on massively parallel computation on desktop computers scattered around the world. SETI@home utilizes recorded data from the Arecibo radio telescope and searches for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space, signifying the presence of extraterrestrial technology. It was soon recognized that this same data might be scoured for other signals of value to the astronomy and physics community.
"One for Sorrow" is a traditional children's nursery rhyme about magpies. According to an old superstition, the number of magpies seen tells if one will have bad or good luck.
In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio pulse of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond, for an ultra-fast radio burst, to 3 seconds, caused by some high-energy astrophysical process not yet understood. Astronomers estimate the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days. While extremely energetic at their source, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon.
In radio astronomy, perytons are short man-made radio signals of a few milliseconds resembling fast radio bursts (FRB). A peryton differs from radio frequency interference by the fact that it is a pulse of several to tens of millisecond duration which sweeps down in frequency. They are further verified by the fact that they occur at the same time in many beams, indicating that they come from Earth, whereas FRBs occur in only one or two of the beams, indicating that they are of galactic origin. The first signal occurred in 2001 but was not discovered until 2007. First detected at the Parkes Observatory, data gathered by the telescope also suggested the source was local. The signals were found to be caused by premature opening of a microwave oven door nearby.
Ingrid Stairs is a Canadian astronomer currently based at the University of British Columbia. She studies pulsars and their companions as a way to study binary pulsar evolution, pulsar instrumentation and polarimetry, and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). She was awarded the 2017 Rutherford Memorial Medal for physics of the Royal Society of Canada, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018.
Bibliography of speculative fiction writer Seanan McGuire and her pseudonyms Mira Grant and A. Deborah Baker.