Sunday, February 9, 2020

Something in Deep Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles

Well, it's aliens.

A mysterious radio source located in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth is pulsing on a 16-day cycle, like clockwork, according to a new study. This marks the first time that scientists have ever detected periodicity in these signals, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), and is a major step toward unmasking their sources.

Pulses from these repeat bursts have, so far, seemed somewhat random and discordant in their timing. But that changed last year, when the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB), a group dedicated to observing and studying FRBs, discovered that a repeater called FRB 180916.J0158+65 had a regular cadence. 
The CHIME/FRB team kept tabs on the repeating burst between September 2018 and October 2019 using the CHIME radio telescope in British Columbia. During that period, the bursts were clustered into a period of four days, and then seemed to switch off for the next 12 days, for a total cycle of about 16 days. Some cycles did not produce any visible bursts, but those that did were all synced up to the same 16-day intervals. 


5 comments:

  1. Those "signals" started this way before there was life on our planet. It MUST be a natural phenomenon.--Ray

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  2. Life first appeared on Earth about 1.5 billion years ago after it formed and had cooled enough for liquid water to remain on the surface. However, it's believed that it remained at the single cell level of development for about 2 billion more years. The Cambrian Explosion was about 500 million years ago, so yeah, there WAS life on Earth at the time (and a lot of it) when those signals (if that is what they actually are) first started coming our way, but the most advanced life at the time were primitive fishes -- we humans don't show up 'til several hundred million years later. If an alien intelligent had detected our biosphere, they might have been betting that something intelligent that was capable of perceiving this phenonmenea would have evolved here by the time the signals arrived. Question is, are the senders still around after all this time?

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    1. But wouldn't they need to have been here a billion years ago to send the 500 million year message back, so they could start sending?
      Unless they had a faster than light speed messaging app.

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    2. Check your numbers, Einstein. Also, hahahahahahahaha

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  3. To quote Stephen Wright, everybody knows the speed of light.....anybody know the speed of dark?....

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