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Search for Aliens Finds Rare and Mysterious Radio Signal

posted by martyb on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:20AM   
from the Adding-aliens-to-press-release-to-sound-sexy dept.

Anonymous Coward writes:

The Breakthrough Listen project discovered what is called a Fast Radio Burst while scanning the skies from Australia as part of the biggest search for extra terrestrial life in the Milky Way and nearby stars.

Breakthrough Listen scientist Danny Price said it was exciting when the burst from billions of light years away was picked up, but it was unlikely aliens were behind it.

[...] It is not the first burst to be detected, with the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope picking up the first one in 2001.

The bursts last for about a millisecond, and sound like an ambulance driving past when picked up by special receivers.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-23/search-for-aliens-finds-mysterious-radio-signal/9788202

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Original Submission

• Breakthrough Listen involvement (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:34AM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:34AM (#683457) Journal

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Listen [wikipedia.org]

  On August 30, 2017, Breakthrough Listen said it picked a series of 15 radio bursts coming from a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years away.

  A fast radio burst is not exactly new, although we have heard the "aliens cause FRBs when they turn on their warp drive" argument.

  This just shows that Breakthrough Listen is funding radio astronomy beyond what governments care to, even if they never find the evidence of extraterrestrial communications that they are looking for.

  https://www.airspacemag.com/space/new-seti-search-180959126/ [airspacemag.com]

  Breakthrough Listen will take advantage of the data from Siemion’s work with Green Bank, but more importantly, it comes at a crucial time for the observatory. Constructed in a valley in the West Virginia mountains, the Green Bank Telescope opened in 2000 as part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. NRAO is funded by the National Science Foundation and runs several facilities, including the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile (“The Universe’s Baby Boom,” Aug. 2013). But in 2012, NSF issued a report on the next 10 years of astronomy research that recommended pulling Green Bank’s funding by 2017, because some of its research abilities are duplicated at larger facilities like the VLA and Arecibo Observatory. Now SETI—usually the research area struggling for funding—has come along with Breakthrough Listen at just the right moment, providing a reason and the means to keep the telescope operating while its staff looks for additional funding.

  [...] SETI is using some of the project funding to expand Green Bank’s computer capabilities far beyond those of any previous radio SETI project. The system will be able to process and store as much data in a single day as existing projects do in a year or more. Then it’s sent out to the SETI team at Berkeley and SETI@Home volunteers for analysis. The extra processing and storage capabilities are necessary because Breakthrough Listen will scan billions of radio channels between 1 and 10 gigahertz. Earlier surveys have been able to scan no more than a few hundred million channels at a time, with about half the spectral range. “We probably have a trillion times better capabilities today than when I started 40 years ago,” says Werthimer.

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