peryton

名词 n.
中文释义

英文释义

名词 n.
  1. A fictional creature having the head and forelegs of a stag and the wings and hindquarters of a bird.
    — 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.
  2. A radio signal which appears to come from outside the galaxy but is actually produced by terrestrial sources.
    — 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.)

词形变化

perytons plural

词源

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).
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