Mystery radio bursts from the depths of the universe

Astronomers searching the skies for pulsars instead found a mysterious burst of radio activity, nothing like anything any of them had seen before. According to Reuters, the researchers were trawling through a back catalogue of data from the Parkes telescope in Australia when they came across the signal. It was five milliseconds …

[Dan]

when stars collide

it is like celestial celebrity wife swap.

[Costa Mihalidis]

seti?

i'm a loyal seti fan for many years now

and the seti@home project has been running on my system for an equal amount of years

i was just wondering why it is that they never picked up on this with all that donated cpu power..

or maybe they have and haven't told us about it..

just curious

[Daniel Bennett]

Or Maybe...

Maybe someone turned a light off in the building, and the speakers interfeared?

[Matt]

So why look?

So they trawl the sky looking for unusual bursts of high energy radio waves as a possible sign of alien life.

Then when they finally find one, they dismiss it without thoroughly checking it out.

hmmm, what's that helicopter doing outside?

[nev]

It came from outer space...

So.. just because the signal is bigger than we can currently comprehend or reproduce... it 'must' be naturally occuring?

Surely if you want to send a viable signal over vast distances... it needs to be of a vast magnitude?

[Luther Blissett]

Crikey

(sic) I just did a hex dump of a log file and found an 0xFF in it. That's why I'm telling El Reg readers about it.

I could go on and speculate that it's something very exotic like an EoF and that maybe my hard disk got zapped by a passing cosmic ray nucleus, and that lots of these could be happening every day (before breakfast, as the Queen said to Alice). But I'll leave it to the boffins and their fanboyz.

[Anonymous Coward]

Zefram Cochrane

It's obviously the Vulcans testing out their warp-drive. Give it a few hundred years and they'll be stopping by to check out our "Mystery 'Radio' Burst"...

[Darrell]

Durrrr!

"more of these bursts could be happening everyday," but they cant find them!

Ha They should've fitted RDS to the telescopes. I have it in my car and I very rarely lose a radio signal. Except for a stretch of 2 miles on my way home from work but that RIGHT out in the sticks, so its to be expected.

[Stuart Halliday]

You have one new message...

When God gets left a message on his phone, he needs a LOUD ringtone.

;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly a Big Bang

Wouldn't you think that two stars colliding would make a noise that lasts slightly longer than 5ms...

[Dale]

Ping

Maybe the alien life is pinging us! We should build something that can be very powerful for a short amount of time to reply with!!!!! Or else the aliens will be getting a request timed out and we will never see them :(

Instead of stars colliding maybe it was the sound of a mother ship comming out of warp speed, or going into it! :D hehehe

[Anonymous Coward]

!Seti

Costa, Seti@home code is designed to ignore interesting things like colliding black holes, and look only for absurdly unlikely stuff like a remote civilization using the same technology that we have for under 100 years, and almost certainly won't be using in another 20 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It came from outer space...

Most likely, the energy range was around that of a star being annihilated and had a spread of frequencies in the standard bell curve shape. In other words, if it was a deliberate signal then the Little Green Men are destroying chunks of their own galaxy in order to broadcast white noise.

Or maybe they built a Death Star and are just blowing stuff up for shits and giggles.

[Anonymous Coward]

This dish ?

So that's the same dish as they used for the moon landing transmissions ?

Quite a funny geek movie was made of that and the role of the Parkes station : 'The Dish' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/

So who knows. It might just have been Sam Neills ego moving past.

[Smokey Joe]

space is deep

"Surely if you want to send a viable signal over vast distances... it needs to be of a vast magnitude?"

I'd be expecting something lasting months or years rather than 5 milliseconds.

[Fluffykins]

The mystic comments

What is the sound of one star colliding?

If two stars collide and there's noone there to hear them, do they make a sound?

Did it say 2LO calling?

[Curtis]

I'm so sorry...but someone had to say it

The truth is that it's an interstellar viral vid....the BEM's are sending "All you base are belong to us"

I'm so gonna die for that one

[A. Merkin]

'Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

The sound of the Death Star blowing up Aldeeran is only now reaching Earth...

[Bloody_Yank]

If 2 stars collide

and no one is recording it ..... is there still a 5msec burst ?

[JeffyPooh]

They've handed the file over to the...

The boffins have handed the file over to the RIAA for enforcement.

"There's been enough music written and performed over the past decades that one of our clients will have a copyright on any possible burst of noise," the spokesman said. He continued, "In this case the noise is strikingly similar to the sound of a smashing guitar towards the end of an AC/DC performance in 1971."

The RIAA will be looking for $100 million from the ETs.

[Harry Brotten]

censorship

They are so incredibly stuoid for not to have had this computor in prime opperating condition it makes me feel as if a computor is censoring me. And i feel human should dominate computors not visa versa SOOOoo Sorry most Honorable ones. So i guess I will censor my information to share SEEEe YA!

[Chris Goodchild]

Hardly a big bang?

If you get your stopwatch out and time the next H bomb test , it will certainly have finished along with you and your watch in less than 5ms. Also to still be at a detectable level at a distance of 3 billion light years means it was a respectable bang.

[amanfromMars]

Self Doubt defeats everyone, ...undoubtedly when richly deserved for in flagrante delicto abuse.

"And i feel human should dominate computors not visa versa SOOOoo Sorry most Honorable ones. So i guess I will censor my information to share SEEEe YA!"

And what makes you think that they don't dominate computers, Harry Brotten, they are only Virtual Machines Created by IntelAIgents, after all is said and done. And what is you are a BIOLogistical Machine.... Basic In Out Logistics?

And One which RSS Feeds UpDates, Fit for Purpose to enable Autonomous Spontaneous SMART Conversion to AI Beta In Out Lead Machinery.

BIOLead sounds QuITe Natural too.

"So i guess I will censor my information to share" Crikey, is that fair to you if it is worth sharing?

[Stan]

@JeffyPooh

Sorry for being a smartarse but AC/DC started up in '73. As for the RIAA, that sound was out way before the first thing crawled onto a beach on earth so the klingons and god will have to fight it out for the rights (and hopefully vaporise the RIAA's ass in the process :) )

cheers

[David]

It's the Borg

Say what you want, just don't answer.

[Billy Verreynne]

It Worked!!

Word from the reputable ufologist cooks and trustworthy conspiracy loons is that MJ12 just defeated a major alien invasion armada launched by The Dreaded Grays.. by sending these big black eye alien bastards the most awesomely sophisticated and cunningly crafted computer virus ever created...

The virus overloaded the on-board ship computers of the alien mother ship, resulting in a catastrophic chain reaction that annihilated the alien armada. This obviously caused a lot of noise on the radio. (and as AC/DC made a lot of noise too, RIAA is understandably confused)

THANK YOU VISTA!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aliens

Maybe it was aliens trying to make contact with a huge sound system, but blew 5ms after they tryed it. Probably trying to warn other lifeforms that 'The Borg' is coming!

[Anonymous Coward]

5 MS

Well if it was a collision then the burst would be longer than 5ms however if the burst was Directional (Think laser) and the source was spining you would only get a very short 'Burst' of energy say about 5ms.. so it is perfectly feasible. The same is true for gamma ray burst from black holes exhaust Jets, if the hole is oscilating we will get periodic flashes based on the oscilation.

My question is, how strong was it? and did it affect us? ie did it coincide with any other know events at that time?

[Anonymous Coward]

titliepoops

My money is on Microwave in the 3pm tea break at the staff canteen.