A 2.9 hr Periodic Radio Transient with an Optical Counterpart:
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> No good movies and music yet...(decoded that is)
> But at least technical details such as frequency etc..
> Some very peculiar.
A close-orbiting pair of white dwarf stars could be doing lots of peculiar stuff, without any help from aliens.
Would a cluster of three or more be stable? If so:
Dit-dit-dit dah Dit-dit-dit dah Dit-dit-dit dah
or even: dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah
It probably is something in a tight orbit around an M class star although how it manages to do what it does is an open question.
Hopefully someone will point a really big scope with time resolved spectroscopy at it and get a better idea of the internal dynamics. Unusually broadband emission so it is a bit odd.
It is likely some variant of SS433 or a white dwarf plus M class star binary but only time and better observations will tell. Linear polarised emissions means quite strong ordered magnetic fields and the temporal variation puts very tight bounds on how big it can be!
Serendipitous discovery of weird objects usually involves a bit of new physics with any luck (a la pulsars original trace marked "LGM").
3 body problem remains unsolved and probably insoluble analytically apart from a special case of fairly massive stars in mutual orbit and a small mass at one of the two stable L4, L5 Lagrange points like the Trojan asteroids locked in equilateral triangles with Jupiter and the sun.
I can't find anything suitable online but it seemed like a very reasonable way to explain Bode's law from first principles and the same locked resonance patterns seen in other planetary moons. This is the closest I've been able to dig up. Ovenden's conjecture gets and honourable mention in A.E. Roy's 1970's book "Orbital Motion".
This comes closest:
Michael Ovenden was my celestial mechanics and galactic dynamics prof at UBC. A great guy, whose hobby was teaching New Age workshops at Cold Mountain Institute. (An odd name for a small barge floating in the harbor, but I digress.)
Died pretty young, unfortunately.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Yes before retirement - it was a shame. Do you remember the title of his paper making this conjecture that I am struggling to recall? I'm guessing it had a more anodyne name at the time of publication with Ovenden's conjecture what A.E. Roy called it later in his 1970's book.
We had Donald Lynden Bell and Martin Rees for astrophysics.
Unfortunately not.
Must have been great fun. It’s usually the guy who first figures something out who writes best about it—you have to have a clear simple concept to do that.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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