A team of UK scientists have traced the origins of mysterious “alien signals” to a galaxy six billion light years away.
Seventeen “fast radio bursts” (FRBs) recorded since 2007 are believed to show proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, and scientists have been busy researching their origins for the last nine years.
The cause of the bursts is still unknown, but scientists say they emit as much energy as the sun emits in 10,000 years.
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Scott.net reports:
Astronomer Evan Keane from the UK’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, who led the scientific team that published the new findings in the journal Nature, was able to record one of the most recent radio burst called FRB 150418 on April 18, 2015 with the help of the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. It lasted less than one millisecond, the shortest of them all.
The process of pinpointing its location was long. First Australia’s telescope located the radio afterglow in space and then a second 8.2-meter-long telescope in Hawaii, known as the Subaru Telescope, helped trace the origin of the wave to an elliptical galaxy, which is an off-spherical concentration of stars believed to be relatively old.
Some have speculated that the bursts could be a signal sent by extraterrestrial intelligence. “Nope! Sorry,” Keane said in response to this theory, as quoted by AFP.
The radio waves most likely originate from two colliding neutron stars, which at some point were orbiting each other before merging, according to Keane. Due to the composition of the galaxy, it is more likely that a collision of two dead stars caused the radio bursts, rather than the explosion of a supernova, astronomers say.
Keane is now working with his team to determine how much material the radio wave passed through before being recorded on Earth. According to the astronomer, this could answer some of the biggest scientific mysteries, such as the measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
Scientists plan to use such radio bursts in the future to create a map that could help detail the magnetic fields between various galaxies and determine what type of matter exists in space.
The discovery might also shed some light on the “missing matter question” question. Scientists believe that the universe consists of 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent undetermined dark matter, and around five percent ordinary matter or, more specifically, what planets and stars are made of.
Astronomers are currently only able to identify half of the ordinary matter, while the other half is labelled as “missing matter.”
