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Scientists say aliens could be responsible for ‘Extragalactic’ radio waves.
Scientists are inspecting unexplainable radio wave bursts that could be information from alien life forms, after a team of Australians came across the phenomenon.
Over the past 15 years, ten of the strange flashes have been caught by radio telescope, showing a mathematical pattern that has puzzled experts, in a non fiction version of the 1997 film Contact.
Lasting only a few milliseconds, the radio waves erupt with around as much energy as realesed by the sun in a month, reports New Scientist.
It all began in 2014 at the CSIRO’s Telescope in Parkes, central-west New South Wales, when it picked up a real-time radio burst, which was a world first that triggered a search through data that revealed nine events similar in nature.
What makes them so noteworthy is that the time between the appearance of the first and final waves of every burst is always near to a multiple of 187.5. This is a mathematical phenomenon to which no explanation has been discovered.
The concision of the bursts, and the span between the lower and higher frequencies, means they are most likely to come from an origin that is both very small — at the most a few hundreds of kilometers across at most — and extremely far away, possibly in some other galaxy.
The study was initiated by Michael Hippke from the Institute for Data Analysis located in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany. That being said, John Learned from Manoa's University of Hawaii, came to the conclusion that there was a 5 in 10,000 likelihood of this mathematical phenomenon being just a coincidence.
The researchers searched for possible explanations for the bursts of radio waves also known as FRBs.
- The first being the limitations in the knowledge of humans; perhaps we haven’t enough knowledge of physics.
- On the other hand, human technology such as a spy satellite which is unmapped could be to blame.
- Or perhaps the origin of the waves could be an extraterrestrial flare, a sign from aliens trying to get our attention.
- It is possible, however, the bursts originated from a more earthly source. Mysterious pulses in 2010, picked up by the Parkes Telescope turned out to not come from another galaxy, but from the site's microwave in the kitchen.
While the scientists quickly realised the nature of the signals, which are different from FRBs, it’s a good illustration of how an ordinary phenomenon can perplex even highly trained scientists — albeit briefly.
The culprit? A worker who went to microwave their lunch, opened the microwave door too early, resulting in a pulse that has similar characteristics to an astrophysical burst.
In no way did this detract from the scientists’ findings that the FRBs they've been studying emanated from another galaxy.
Good example of Occam's Razor ""when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."
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