Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope

Abstract

"Perytons" are millisecond-duration transients of terrestrial origin, whose frequency-swept emission mimics the dispersion of an astrophysical pulse that has propagated through tenuous cold plasma. In fact, their similarity to FRB 010724 had previously cast a shadow over the interpretation of "fast radio bursts," which otherwise appear to be of extragalactic origin. Until now, the physical origin of the dispersion-mimicking perytons had remained a mystery. We have identified strong out-of-band emission at 2.3--2.5 GHz associated with several peryton events. Subsequent tests revealed that 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. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals. Now that the peryton source has been identified, we furthermore demonstrate that the microwaves on site could not have caused FRB 010724. This and other distinct observational differences show that FRBs are excellent candidates for genuine extragalactic transients.

8 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (6)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• The Galactic Position Dependence of Fast Radio Bursts and the Discovery of FRB 011025
• Wide-band Simultaneous Observations of Pulsars: Disentangling Dispersion Measure and Profile Variations
• An absence of fast radio bursts at intermediate galactic latitudes
• A search for dispersed radio bursts in archival Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey data
• Fast Transients at Cosmological Distances with the SKA

Cited by in corpus (58)

• Fast Radio Bursts
• Fast Radio Bursts: An Extragalactic Enigma
• A Living Theory Catalogue for Fast Radio Bursts
• The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project: System Overview
• The Physical Mechanisms of Fast Radio Bursts
• The repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102: Multi-wavelength observations and additional bursts
• Supergiant Pulses from Extragalactic Neutron Stars
• The Physics of Fast Radio Bursts
• The SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts II: New FRB discoveries and their follow-up
• Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using ALFA. IV. Mock Spectrometer Data Analysis, Survey Sensitivity, and the Discovery of 41 Pulsars
• The SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts I: Survey Description and Overview
• Fast Radio Bursts
• Radio Non-Detection of the SGR 1806-20 Giant Flare and Implications for Fast Radio Bursts
• Inferences from the Distributions of Fast Radio Burst Pulse Widths, Dispersion Measures and Fluences
• A polarized fast radio burst at low Galactic latitude
• Applying Deep Learning to Fast Radio Burst Classification
• A survey of FRB fields: Limits on repeatability
• FRB event rate counts I --- Interpreting the Observations
• Are the distributions of Fast Radio Burst properties consistent with a cosmological population?
• A search for rotating radio transients and fast radio bursts in the Parkes high-latitude pulsar survey
• Fast Radio Bursts
• Unintended electromagnetic radiation from Starlink satellites detected with LOFAR between 110 and 188 MHz
• No low-frequency emission from extremely bright Fast Radio Bursts
• STARE2: Detecting Fast Radio Bursts in the Milky Way
• A Fast Radio Burst with frequency-dependent polarization detected during Breakthrough Listen observations
• The discovery and scientific potential of fast radio bursts
• Single-pulse classifier for the LOFAR Tied-Array All-sky Survey
• Commensal discovery of four Fast Radio Bursts during Parkes Pulsar Timing Array observations
• A Machine Learning Classifier for Fast Radio Burst Detection at the VLBA
• The Future of Fast Radio Burst Science
• The Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transient incoherent-sum survey
• Fast radio bursts: the observational case for a Galactic origin
• Piggyback search for fast radio bursts using Nanshan 26m and Kunming 40m radio telescopes -- I. Observing and data analysis systems, discovery of a mysterious peryton
• Limits on the ultra-bright Fast Radio Burst population from the CHIME Pathfinder
• Classifying RRATs and FRBs
• The nature of fast radio bursts
• Search for transient gravitational waves in coincidence with short duration radio transients during 2007-2013
• Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950
• A Search for Highly Dispersed Fast Radio Bursts in Three Parkes Multibeam Surveys
• Birth and Evolution of Fast Radio Bursts: Strong Population-Based Evidence for a Neutron-Star Origin
• 81 New Candidate Fast Radio Bursts in Parkes Archive
• Multi-messenger astronomy of gravitational-wave sources with flexible wide-area radio transient surveys
• The Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS): Design, Commissioning, Data Release, and Detection of the first 5 Fast Radio Bursts
• Parkes transient events: I. Database of single pulses, initial results and missing FRBs
• The Galactic halo pulsar population
• Verifying and Reporting Fast Radio Bursts
• Applying saliency-map analysis in searches for pulsars and fast radio bursts
• Unsupervised Machine Learning for Classifying CHIME Fast Radio Bursts and Investigating Empirical Relations
• Categorize Radio Interference using component and temporal analysis
• A Dictionary Approach to Identifying Transient RFI
• An Exploration of How Training Set Composition Bias in Machine Learning Affects Identifying Rare Objects
• Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment on Giant Radio Pulses of Crab Pulsar toward Fast Radio Burst Detection
• A 21 cm pilot survey for pulsars and transients using the Focal L-Band Array for the Green Bank Telescope
• One of Everything: The Breakthrough Listen Exotica Catalog
• A Radio Burst Detection Method Based on the Hough Transform
• #FoundThem - 21st Century Pre-Search and Post-Detection SETI Protocols for Social and Digital Media
• Eighteen new fast radio bursts in the High Time Resolution Universe survey
• On the problems of detecting Fast Radio Bursts with the LPA LPI