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Scientists Find Patterns in Unusual Radio Bursts From Space - Strange Physics or Alien Civilization?

posted by on Thursday April 02 2015, @08:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the leave-a-message-after-the-beep dept.

AnonTechie writes in with an astronomical conundrum. Scientists from Hawaii and Germany have characterized [Abstract;Full paper] a series of radio signals known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and theorize that they may originate from a group of objects within the Milky Way. The New Scientist discusses the phenomenon and addresses some of the group's findings:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by dublet on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:55AM

    by dublet (2994) on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:55AM (#165771)

    And indeed the wikipedia page on FRBs [wikipedia.org] has a few theories outlined, none of which involve little green men:

    Because of the isolated nature of the observed phenomenon, the nature of the source remains speculative. As of 2015, there is no generally accepted explanation. The emission region is estimated to be no larger than a few hundred kilometers. If the bursts come from cosmological distances, their sources must be very bright.[9] One possible explanation would be a collision between very dense objects like black holes or neutron stars. Blitzars [wikipedia.org] are another proposed explanation.[9] It has been suggested that there is a connection to gamma ray bursts [wikipedia.org].[10] More recently, it has been proposed that FRBs could be originated in black hole explosions: if so, FRBs would be the first detection of Quantum Gravity [wikipedia.org] effects.[11]

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 02 2015, @02:44PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday April 02 2015, @02:44PM (#165839) Homepage
    Holy jeebus, that's a badly written page, as are the majority of the pages it links to. Reliability measurement - didn't cause my needle to twitch.
    --
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