#2886: Fast Radio Bursts
Permalink
Transcript
[Cueball standing behind a lectern, with a poster hung from the ceiling behind him, raising his hand]
Potential sources of fast radio bursts:
(1) Energetic stellar-sized astrophysical objects floating in space
Cueball: We're pretty sure this is what most of them are.
[Close-up on Cueball, not raising hand.]
(2) Microwave ovens in the observatory break room
Cueball: This was some of them, oops. (Petroff et. al., 2015)
(3) Energetic steller-sized microwave ovens floating in space
Cueball: We think this one is unlikely.
[Zoom out back to perspective of first panel.]
(4) Energetic stellar-sized astrophysical objects in the observatory break room
Cueball: This is almost certainly not it, though we're sending a grad student to double-check.
(Sourced from explainxkcd.com)
Title text:Dr. Petroff has also shown that the Higgs boson signal was actually sparks from someone microwaving grapes, the EHT black hole photo was a frozen bagel someone left in too long, and the LIGO detection was just someone slamming the microwave door too hard.