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BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometers across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2015, @08:36AM
One piece of information I couldn't find (though I only scanned through the actual paper, so I might have missed it there) is the directions those bursts came from. Did they all come from the same direction in the sky (relative to the stars)? Or are they all from different directions?
If all directions are the same, I'd see that as a strong hint that they are indeed coming from outside the solar system. Otherwise, I'd consider the satellite hypothesis far more likely.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 02 2015, @12:51PM
From the direction of the one-eyed monster [wikipedia.org]. Better call Veronica.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 02 2015, @05:32PM
Sorry, but Veronica [wikipedia.org] is no longer available.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.