peryton

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

peryton (plural perytons)

1. A fictional winged stag.
   • 2007 August 5, Ligaya Mishan, “Lost Pets”, in New York Times‎:

     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, 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, volume 341, number 6141, page 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, 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.

• Poynter, entropy