peryton

English

Etymology

Coined by the translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni translating Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, from Borges' invented Spanish peritio. Astrophysical use began with a paper by S. Burke-Spolaor et al. (see quotations).

Noun

peryton (plural perytons)

1. A fictional creature having the head and forelegs of a stag and the wings and hindquarters of a bird. [from 20th c.]
   • 1982, Gene Wolfe, chapter XII, in The Sword of the Lictor (The Book of the New Sun; 3), New York: Timescape, →ISBN, pages 88–89:

     Then, quite unexpectedly, when I had been staring at them for a long time, the shape of a peryton seemed to spring out as distinctly as if the bird's whole body had been powdered with the dust ground from diamonds.

   • 2007 August 5, Ligaya Mishan, “Lost Pets”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     The peryton also makes an appearance, in a nod to its inventor, Borges — who compiled his own bestiary, “The Book of Imaginary Beings,” itself supposedly based on a long-lost medieval text.

2. (astronomy) A radio signal which appears to come from outside the galaxy but is actually produced by terrestrial sources.
   • 2011 January 20, S. Burke-Spolaor et al., “Radio Bursts with Extragalactic Spectral Characteristics Show Terrestrial Origins”, in The Astrophysical Journal‎^[2], volume 727, number 1:

     Despite a trend mimicking that expected from dispersion, such deviations decisively distinguish the pulses’ frequency-dependence from a delay induced by interstellar propagation. Hereafter we distinguish these detections with the name “Perytons,” representing the non-dispersive, highly swept, terrestrial signals exhibited by the pulses. (The name is chosen from mythology to be unassociated with an exact physical phenomenon, due to the ambiguous origin of the detections; Perytons are winged elk that cast the shadow of a man.)

   • 2013 July 5, D. Thornton et al., “A Population of Fast Radio Bursts at Cosmological Distances”, in Science‎^[3], volume 341, number 6141, pages 53–56:

     Three of these FRBs are factors of >3 narrower than any documented peryton.

   • 2014 June 10, E. Petrov et al., “An Absence of Fast Radio Bursts at Intermediate Galactic Latitudes”, in Astrophysics Journal Letters‎^[4], volume 789, number 2:

     In this model, the Lorimer burst, which was detected in three adjacent beams of the multibeam receiver, occupies a place between traditional FRB events and traditional peryton events and is believed to have occurred at some distance from the detector close to the Fresnel scale for Parkes, 20 km.

Translations

mythical creature

• French: péritio m
• Japanese: ペリュトン
• Portuguese: perítio m
• Russian: перито́н (ru) (peritón)
• Spanish: peritio m

astronomical event

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 佩里頓

Anagrams

• Poynter, entropy