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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   
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.

• Re:All these worlds are yours... Re:All these worlds are yours... (Score: 2) by TK on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:32PM

  by TK (2760) on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:32PM (#165950)

  Arthur C. Clarke talks about collaborating with Kubrick in the foreword to an audiobook version of 2001: A Space Odyssey that you can find on youtube [youtube.com].

  As for that line, it's not in 2001, you may be thinking of "My god, it's full of stars", which is in the novel but not the movie.

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  The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum

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• Re:All these worlds are yours... Re:All these worlds are yours... (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday April 02 2015, @10:44PM

  by JNCF (4317) on Thursday April 02 2015, @10:44PM (#165966) Journal

  You're totally right. I guess I'm not sure where I got it from (probably a friend or a wiki), but the line has definitely been bumping around my meat-drive for a while with (evidently wrong) neural links to the book version of 2001.

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  • Re:All these worlds are yours... (Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday April 03 2015, @03:16AM

    by Covalent (43) on Friday April 03 2015, @03:16AM (#166013) Journal

    You are all correct about 2001 being a book / movie collaboration.

    But this line was definitely not in 2001. It was in 2010, which was written as a book first, then made into a movie:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two [wikipedia.org]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_%28film%29 [wikipedia.org]

    They even quote the lines in both pages. I really hate the addition...sigh.

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    You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.

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