13 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] thread
“Not aliens” but sure makes sense to follow standard Imperial procedure and let your comms float away with the rest of the garbage.
You know, like they're hiding their message in something that could be seen as natural.
> located 11.7 million light-years from Earth

I might consider 11.7 light-years "unusual" or "baffling." But times that by a million and it becomes a lot less so.

Ahh, so blasé.

The farthest observable galaxy is 1.34 x 10^10 light years.

This FRB is 1.17 x 10^7 light years.

So if you're at zero and end of the line is at 1340, this FRB is at 1.17. That doesn't feel close?

(comment deleted)
If you told me that the Mediterranean dried up "recently", with no other context, and you were referring to Messinian salinity crisis from 5 MYBP it would significantly limit my belief in your adherence to good-faith conversational form even if it is "recently" in a geological sense.
I think the article says it's 40 times nearer than the previous closest, which seems more relevant than the farthest galaxy.
The “Nearby” in the titles needed to be in scare quotes.
It’s actually just an icy fractal aggregate ejected from a protoplanetary disk and was heard because swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the sound from Venus.
National Geographic always makes this kind of clickbait titles.
Hey, NatGeo doesn't bother me. I know it's NatGeo, so I discount it accordingly.

I reckon it's pretty interesting that the scientists claim to have "conclusively proved" that this very high-energy event occurred in a globular cluster. The article is quite right to note that that's not supposed to happen. Violent cosmic events don't happen in globular clusters.