Discrete steps in dispersion measures of Fast Radio Bursts · HackerPapers discussions

Discrete steps in dispersion measures of Fast Radio Bursts — HN submission

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 15:42:08 GMT

Discrete Steps in Dispersion Measures of Fast Radio Bursts [pdf]

10 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Discrete steps in dispersion measures of Fast Radio Bursts — mentioned by TheOtherHobbes

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 15:17:36 GMT

See also: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.05245v2.pdf which suggests the FRB dispersions are quantised to a standard unit. A lot of newsies picked this up last week and suggested it was proof of... something unusual. The authors think it suggests the opposite. Given the date, I can't tell if the paper is serious or not. But if it's meant to be serious, the effect seems real - possibly an artefact of a very small sample size, but it's hard to tell. It would be useful to have access to the raw data to see the exact dispersion shape and frequency range, to check whether it matches - say - any standard…

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Discrete steps in dispersion measures of Fast Radio Bursts — mentioned by Sniffnoy

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 06:06:18 GMT

A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc.

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Discrete steps in dispersion measures of Fast Radio Bursts — mentioned by dchichkov

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 05:22:32 GMT

The paper starts with: "Eleven FRBs have been detected so far, nine with the Parkes and one at the Arecibo telescope." That arithmetic is wrong. Tongue-in-the-cheek - April's fool? edit: it actually seems more like a genuine typo in a pre-print. The list further in the article contains 10 FRBs from Parkes. edit 2: linked to the abstract. http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245

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