Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy Astronomers have, for the first time, detected a fast radio burst that spews powerful radio signals from the distant depths of space on a regular schedule, according to fresh research. Fast radio bursts are bizarre. They appear as bright blips of radio light that last less than a few milliseconds before disappearing, only to …
And half the sites on the internet will include Javascript that autoexecutes a reading of the alien message by Kanye West over, and over, and over. There will be a Close button on the video. But, being Javascript, it will take between seven and thirteen minutes to work once activated.
Fortunately, The round trip latency for these radio bursts will be about six billion years, so we don't have to worry to much about folks calling in to the station and requesting their favorite Volgon poem.
Maybe we could send a star ship out to investigate...
And then the report comes back, the entire system was discriminated but had held a super powerful alien race, buildings everywhere - one building had a broken window that was flapping in the solar breeze and knocking against a device that looks like it might have been an old mobile phone. As the window touched the screen it seems to have been making a post on some alien app called Tentaclebook.
(On the Beach updated).
"Oh God, aliens... Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys - it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall - it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day, you thought that was aliens as well!"
It's unreasonable to suggest that aliens might be broadcasting messages in arbitrary directions at cosmic power levels on varied schedules from multiple locations across the galaxy and even other galaxies.* The days of lighthouses and hidden rocks are long gone.
Any aliens who can detect the things too are more likely to be like us and wondering WTF?
.
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* Unless they were Vogons, of course.
It's unreasonable to suggest that aliens might be broadcasting messages in arbitrary directions at cosmic power levels on varied schedules from multiple locations across the galaxy and even other galaxies.*
The big issue I've seen with trying to detect "alien" transmissions (presuming they even broadcast in a band/frequency we'd recognize as radio/TV) is we have to detect them at JUST the right period in their development. Just look at our own broadcast history; from Marconi's earliest transmissions in the 1890's to 125 years later, we went on a curve of more and stronger broadcasts, but then moved to cabling, terrestrial satellite (which would be transmitting down to the surface rather than out), and various encoded streaming services over those lines. Moving to digital broadcast meant while we had more bandwidth, we have less range (our house gets *no* broadcast television). I'd suspect we're leaking far less for broadcast signals than even 25 years ago.
So effectively you'd have to catch that other civilization's signals during their century-long "noisy" period. I could be wrong, my wife would attest to that...
It's a well known fact that aliens don't use keys, they teleport in and out so they wouldn't steal your keys.
The large ones are clumsy but you would notice one knocking a picture off the wall, as for toilet paper; you have heard of Terran Tummy?
Preposterous! Of course aliens are not the cause of all unexpected phenomena.
You lose your keys -> gnomes.
A picture falls off the wall -> ghosts.
Recent politics -> OK, this is because of aliens (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/politics-3).
The universe. Some information to help you live in it.
One: ‘Area’. Infinite. As far as anyone can make out
Two: ’Imports’. None. It’s impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.
Three: ‘Exports’. None. See ’Imports’.
Four: ‘Rainfall’. None. Rain can not fall because in an infinite space there is no up for it to fall down from.
Five: ‘Population’. None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, but that not everyone is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds. So, if every planet in the universe has a population of zero, then the entire population of the universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
I know you're joking, but due to expansion, there is only so far we can see across the universe. Due to space expanding uniformly, as you get further away, the relative acceleration away from us increases. There is a limit at which this is the speed of light, and you can see no further. Also, due to red-shifting, the further something is, the longer the wavelength of the light coming from it. Hence the cosmic background radiation (which is the oldest, hence the furthest thing we can see) being in the microwave region of the EM spectrum. If you could see microwaves, the night sky would indeed be pretty bright, from the echoes of the big bang.
Expansion? What expansion? An infinite universe is already infinite and therefore, by definition, cannot expand. So your argument is clearly invalid!
Yes, if you apply modern astrophysics to an idea that was already old when Herr Olber penned it in 1823, then you will find a lot wrong with it. For example, three quarters of all stars are M-dwarfs, which aren't as bright as the sun, so even in an infinite, non-expanding universe, it's unlikely the sky would be as brighter as the sun. And the instellar medium famously reddens light, even without expansion.
Preposterous! Of course aliens are not the cause of all unexpected phenomena.
You lose your keys -> gnomes.
Nope, not that either. It's just that the blue-suited construction workers forgot to place them there when they built that minute.
Besides, everyone knows gnomes steal underpants!
And beer, don't forget the beer to buffer your system...
Ford: “You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
Arthur: “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
Ford: “You ask a glass of water.”
BTW 22:30 UTC on Sunday, 8 March 2020 will mark exactly 42 years since "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was first broadcast - have your towel ready...
It's an alien planet much like ours and every sixteen days they have a celebration of lard and what we are picking up is the surge in messages from them wishing each other a happy lard day. In the future we will find that lard is the one constant in this universe of ours. Praise the lard.
If they have lard then my must make sausages as well. Apart from constituting the hot fat to cook them in toad in the hole making sausages is the only use I have for lard. Thank goodness the stuff is so cheap.
I also have suet for the black pudding I make. Our local Chinese supermarket stocks 500g packs of frozen pig's blood. Mighty convenient. I make a Scottish recipe BP, with lots of oats a bit of cooked rice and secret spices (only found it on one website which constitutes high niche secrecy). Everyone I've fed my BP to has praised it. I use it in place of sausage meat in stuffing poultry. A whole Balmoral chicken.
The only use Aliens have for powerful radio or optical sources is navigation using natural events, mostly Pulsars. Assuming that (a) there is a way to sensibly travel beyond one's own star system and (b) that one or more Alien species has discovered how to do that. Though we already can use Pulsars for interplanetary navigation. Nature's Lighthouses.
This will almost certainly be at least a binary pair of stars.
Possibly the single FRB events are a star "falling" into a black hole or another star.
Fascinating stuff but I can't be the only one saddened that the science world settled on FRB, rather than the much more evocative FRT (Fast Radio Transient). A few years ago there was a lot of talk of noisy Frts being detected out there but I suppose the same people who carefully pronounce ur-an-us put a stop to that. How are we going to get young people (and immature adults, such as myself) interesting in astrophysics if we strip all toilet humour from the subject?
"Fast radio bursts are bizarre. They appear as bright blips of radio light that last less than a few milliseconds before disappearing, only to occasionally pop again unpredictably. Some have only been spotted once, and a few are known to flare up randomly now and again. Their erratic nature makes them difficult to study and scientists still don’t know what they are really caused by."
Obviously this is the exhaust trail of alien hyperdrive technology.
Yes others have suggested this possibility.
Could the "Wow!" signal from 1977 have been some craft dropping out of hyperspace a few hundred LY away due to an engine malfunction sending out a distress signal maybe? Sort of like a cosmic CQD.
Also relevant: LIGO has picked up many strange signals including one the day it was being calibrated but this couldn't be used as it was at the time believed to be a measurement error. In retrospect other sensors picked up something similar so we could have to revise the earliest GW detection back a bit.
Watch this space!!
In a couple of S.F. stories, autonomous probes pass by the Earth. Some of those report home. I sometimes wondered whether the "WOW!" signal was our antenna passing through the beam of one of those.
If it was, depending on the location of the probe and its relationship to Earth and its homeworld we might have been extremely lucky to get even a few seconds of signal. As Earth, Home and Probe are all moving in three-space, it is not astonishing that the signal was never captured gain.
Astronomers did look for other signals coming from where "WOW!" seemed to originate from but heard nothing. Perhaps they should have searched the antipodean point, too?
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