Fast radio bursts

[BundleflowerPower]

Has anyone seen this?

Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space

Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?

www.newscientist.com

"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 kilometres 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."

All of the burst's dispersion measures are multiples of 187.5

This seems pretty fascinating, could it be eti?

 

[RAM]

While it could be, I doubt it personally. Humans tend to look for patterns and find them, even when there aren't really any there as it was beneficial during evolution to be able to identify a predator amongst a background, for example. This is why we see faces in natural formations and give weight to what are otherwise coincidences.

This of course doesn't rule it out, but I think there is better evidence for ET life than some astronomical data. Did you see this? A top NASA scientist said we are only about 20 years out from finding alien life.

Astrobiology is an intensely exciting field, and I really wonder what existential implications finding just some extraterrestrial microorganisms would have!!

 

[BundleflowerPower]

That's very true about humans looking for patterns in everything

 

[Koornut]

"A Type II civilisation has a star's worth of output at its disposal. It would have to capture all its sun's radiation, throw material into a black hole and suck up the radiation, or travel to many planets and strip them of resources."

Meh....that's no big effort right?

 

[Creo]

At least some of these bursts are caused by microwave ovens:

Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope

[1504.02165] Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope

"Perytons" are millisecond-duration transients of terrestrial origin, whose frequency-swept emission mimics the dispersion of an astrophysical pulse that has propagated through tenuous cold plasma. In fact, their similarity to FRB 010724 had previously cast a shadow over the interpretation of "fast radio bursts," which otherwise appear to be of extragalactic origin. Until now, the physical origin of the dispersion-mimicking perytons had remained a mystery. We have identified strong out-of-band emission at 2.3--2.5 GHz associated with several peryton events. Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals. Now that the peryton source has been identified, we furthermore demonstrate that the microwaves on site could not have caused FRB 010724. This and other distinct observational differences show that FRBs are excellent candidates for genuine extragalactic transients.