Category: not Sci-Fi

They don’t know. Maybe aliens.

 

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/scientists-propose-alien-space-probes-may-be-source-of-mysterious-fast-radio-bursts/news-story/9b776830741d1dccae6494309dc0ac78

 

The source of the strange bursts of radio energy known as Fast Radio Bursts have been the cause of much confusion and consternation.

They are pulses of light one billion times brighter than anything seen before.

 

Fast radio bursts are mysterious flashes from deep space that last just a few milliseconds.

They were first seen in 2007.

Since then, about a dozen have been detected by the world’s larger radio telescopes, such as the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales.

Scientists have been scratching their heads as to where they could possibly come from ever since.

A question without an easy answer? Therefore aliens.

Alien megastructures, anyone?

“Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven’t identified a possible natural source with any confidence,” says Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics theorist Avi Loeb in a statement.

“An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.”

He’s one of the authors of a study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

They set out to determine what it would take to create a radio burst strong enough to flash across billions of light years of space.

One such example, they surmised, could be a solar-powered transmitter with a surface area twice the size of the Earth.

Such a machine would involve an enormous construction effort.

But still nowhere near the interplanetary size of the alien megastructure proposed as an explanation for giving the star KIC 8462852 its strange stutter.

And there could be a very strong reason to build such a device.

Interstellar travel.

The raw power contained in such a focused radio stream would be enough to propel a 1-million-tonne ship over interstellar distances, they say.

At 20 times bigger than the largest ocean liner, “that’s big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances,” co-author Manasvi Lingam of Harvard University stated.

So why do we see only a flash?

Such a ship would likely need the radio beam to be blasting into its sails constantly.

The researchers say all things are relative.

The sail-ship is moving. Its host planet is moving. Its star is moving.

This means the radio beams would only occasionally sweep past our direction.

Is this all just pie-in-the-sky thinking?

“Science isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence,” Loeb says.

“Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”

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https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/born-again-australian-telescope-solves-mystery-of-intergalactic-fast-radio-bursts

 

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Since they were first detected almost 10 years ago by the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, these enigmatic radio transients have perplexed astronomers. While they appeared to come from vast distances, their was still a possibility that their origin was closer to home. Were they signals from far-off galaxies or simply some unknown form of local interference?

Now, thanks to the extensive upgrade of the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), located about 350 km south of Parkes near Canberra, there is a definitive answer. In a paper to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a research team from Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Sydney and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), has confirmed the FRBs do in fact originate from outer space and – in some cases, at least – from galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

The research team, headed by PhD candidate and first author Manisha Caleb, has successfully identified the origin of three distinct FRBs.

The use of the updated Molonglo telescope (UTMOST) – a 778-metre-long parabolic cylindrical antenna array comprising a total of 352 independent antennae, with 7,744 ring antennae at the focus of the parabola – overcomes the limitations of the single-dish radio telescopes such as Parkes that initially detected FRBs as one-off events.

“Single-dish antennas have difficulty establishing that transmissions originate beyond Earth’s atmosphere,” explains researcher Dr Chris Flynn of Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

The Molongo antennae’s enormous focal length, however, has enabled researchers to use the technique of interferometric detection to calculate the minimum distance of FRBs.

……….

Caleb, who led the work developing software to do that sifting, explains that UTMOST detects only events more than 10,000 km away, thereby ruling out terrestrial sources of interference as an origin for FRBs.

“The telescope has literally been reborn and transformed exclusively to search for these Fast Radio Bursts,” she says. “We have scientifically confirmed that FRB’s are extra-terrestrial.”

With funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Molonglo telescope will upgraded over the next two years to enable the localisation of FRBs to individual galaxies.

“Figuring out where the bursts come from is the key to understanding what makes them,” Caleb says. “Only one burst has been linked to a specific galaxy.”

That burst, identified by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was only able to be localised as the only FRB known to have been repeated. In future UTMOST should be able to identify the host galaxy of a burst without repeat events.

“We expect Molonglo will do this for many more bursts,” Caleb says.