Quote:Astronomers detect 15 signals from mysterious object in distant galaxy

'It's kind of perplexing,' says Canadian astronomer who first discovered source to be repeating

Quote:While looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe, astronomers have detected 15 fast radio bursts from a distant galaxy.


These poorly understood phenomena are short pulses of radio emission, just milliseconds long, believed to be coming from rapidly spinning neutron stars or black holes in distant galaxies.
A less popular theory is that they're signs of extremely powerful spacecraft from alien civilizations.

This particular fast radio burst (FRB), called FRB 121102, is of particular interest as it is the only known one to be repeating, something that astronomers can't yet explain.

Quote:Earlier this month, astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (a collection of radio telescopes) not only found 15 more bursts, but found them at a higher radio frequency than was ever observed before, the astronomers said in their findings published in The Astronomer's Telegram. 

"It's not surprising that we've found 15 more from this source; we've been detecting many of them over the past few years," Paul Scholz, an astronomer who studies FRBs with the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, B.C., told CBC News. 
"The one thing that's unique about these [new ones] is that they are at a higher frequency than we've ever seen before."

Quote:Scholz, who was not involved with the new discovery, was with McGill University when he and a team of astronomers discovered FRB 121102 to be a repeater. In 2016, a McGill team was able to locate the source of the strange FRB.

At the time the signals left its host galaxy, Earth would have been two billion years old, less than half its current age.

The only living things on the planet would have been single-celled organisms.

Quote:A $100 million search for intelligent aliens has spied 15 bizarre, repeating flashes of light coming from a distant galaxy.

The galaxy — a dwarf known as FRB 121102 that lies 3 billion light-years from Earth — is a known source of such brief, high-energy fast radio bursts(FRBs). But the newly detected pulses stand out, astronomers said.

"Bursts from this source have never been seen at this high a frequency," Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. [Are Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Propelling Alien Spacecraft? (Video)]

Siemion is a team member with Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that's searching for potential signals from alien civilizations from the 1 million stars closest to the sun, the 100 galaxies nearest our own Milky Way, and the galactic plane.

Some researchers think FRBs — which were discovered in 2007 and remain mysterious today — could be such alien signals.

For example, astronomers have speculated that FRBs may be generated by powerful lasersdesigned to blast alien craft through space at high speeds — a propulsion method akin to that being developed by Breakthrough Listen's ambitious sister project, Breakthrough Starshot.
(Aliens aren't the only possible explanation, of course; some scientists think FRBs are likely emitted by fast-rotating neutron stars, for instance.)

Quote:At the time the signals left its host galaxy, Earth would have been two billion years old, less than half its current age.

(09-11-2017, 03:19 PM)Wallfire Wrote: All I can say about this is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY&index=2&list=PLH6hTH5HY39mcUeGbjxFrNcX9L2o05kTq

 

(09-11-2017, 02:22 PM)727Sky Wrote: One of the better videos from Richard