Peculiar radio bursts from the cafeteria
In what is one of my all-time favorite Gizmodo headlines, our former science reporter Maddie Stone wrote: “Mysterious Radio Signals Came From Microwave Oven, Not Outer Space.” Oof.
For years, astronomers at the Parkes Observatory in Australia had been flummoxed by a series of quick radio pulses that appeared to originate from deep space. At the same time, these pulses, dubbed “perytons,” seemed to come from somewhere nearby. As subsequent tests revealed, “a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle,” according to research led by astronomer Emily Petroff from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
