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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: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Thursday April 02 2015, @02:00PM
the universe has a funny way of generating patterns. it's seems far more likely to be something interesting like part of a huge gamma ray burst that got redirected (multiple times?) than an alien technology.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday April 02 2015, @02:42PM
Maybe it has something to do with gravitational lensing: We are seeing the same event again and again, arriving at different times because different products of the event are taking different routes around a large gravity well. The mathematical patterns are due to the orbital rhythms of various bodies within the gravity well (binary / trinary system?)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Translation Error on Thursday April 02 2015, @06:43PM
And we're one of the funniest ways.