peryton

Noun

peryton (plural perytons)

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.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
   • 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.2007 August 5, Ligaya Mishan, “Lost Pets”, in New York Times
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...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
   • Three of these FRBs are factors of >3 narrower than any documented peryton.2013 July 5, D. Thornton et al., “A Population of Fast Radio Bursts at Cosmological Distances”, in Science, volume 341, number 6141, pages 53–56