[HN Gopher] Nature's Electromagnetic Symphony - Whistlers
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Nature's Electromagnetic Symphony - Whistlers
Author : aklsh
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-01-19 06:28 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aklsh.now.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (aklsh.now.sh)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I love the topic of giant electromagnetic phenomena.
|
| Fun topics related to whistlers: STEVE travels at about 3
| miles/second and was recently discovered,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_(atmospheric_phenomeno...
|
| Also, for some reason the human brain emits EM waves with
| wavelengths about the diameter of the earth:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4970
| mikewarot wrote:
| Imagine picking up similar emissions from a planet orbiting a
| different star, which is what I believe they did at Cornell
|
| https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/12/cornell-postdoc-det...
| jorpal wrote:
| I studied these a bit during my PhD. The focus of my research was
| gravitational wave (GW) astronomy which involves incredibly
| sensitive instrumentation. The history of GWs before 2015
| contained notoriously dubious detection claims and we were
| concerned with ruling out any possible factor that could
| influence our measurements. The way statistical significance is
| calculated in the field, any effects that could influence
| multiple geographically-spaced GW detectors within the speed-of-
| light travel time are especially pernicious. That these exotic EM
| phenomena could potentially mimic the time-frequency signature of
| a binary black hole was especially troubling. I built a
| monitoring system to record ambient RF signals and compared it to
| the GW signals. Wideband RF monitoring is actually a pretty
| difficult problem, and in the back of my mind I was always scared
| I missed something, until the neutron star signal GW170817 put
| all doubts to rest.
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(page generated 2021-01-19 23:02 UTC)