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Repeating Radio Signals Coming from Distant Galaxy Detected
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- avs733 9y agoCue the 'aliens' click bait stories in about 24 hours. Less sarcastically...has anyone created some sort of internet archaeology tools that allows quick traceback of information linked from page to page to show how science becomes news then bad news then click bait?
- flukus 9y agoThat would be a great tool. The only examples I've seen are when youtubers like portholer54 do it, presumably manually.
- DonHopkins 9y agoActually the Ancient Babylonians had clay tablets that could trace the origin of information linked from tablet to tablet far more accurately than modern computing devices can.
- Cyph0n 9y ago> far more accurately than modern computing devices can I feel like have no idea how complex computers actually are...
- pavel_lishin 9y ago1. That technology was probably given to them by aliens /s 2. Do you have a link about this? I assume that tablets had identifying marks on them, and subsequent tablets had some sort of "source:" citation on them?
- stephengillie 9y agoNew analysis of a known FRB source. They find new signals. > The source known as FRB 121101 was discovered back on November 2nd, 2012, by astronomers using the Arecibo radio telescope. At the time, it was the first FRB to be discovered; and by 2015, it became the first FRB to be seen repeating. This effectively ruled out the possibility that repeating FRBs were caused by catastrophic events, which had previously been theorized. And in 2016, FRB 121102 was the first FRB to have its location pinpointed to such a degree that its host galaxy could be identified. ... And in the early hours of Saturday, August 26th ... What they found was evidence of 15 new pulses coming from FRB 121102, which confirmed that it was in a newly active state.
- DonHopkins 9y agoOne of my favorite Stanislaw Lem novels is "His Master's Voice", about a message from space (only accidentally discovered because it was recorded on mag tape that was recycled as a one-time random pad, which turned out to inexplicably repeat itself), which had multiple ambiguous conflicting interpretations. It's actually scathing social commentary and philosophical satire about how fucked up government and military sponsored science can be, and the divide between the social scientists (elves) and physical sciences (dwarves). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) Throughout the book Hogarth—or rather, Lem himself—exposes the reader to many debates merging cosmology and philosophy: from discussions of epistemology, systems theory, information theory and probability, through the idea of evolutionary biology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial intelligence, with digressions about ethics in military-sponsored research, to the limitations of human science constrained by the human nature subconsciously projecting itself into the analysis of any unknown subject. At some point one of the involved scientists (Rappaport), desperate for new ideas, even begins to read and discuss popular science-fiction stories, and Lem uses this opportunity to criticize the science fiction genre, as Rappaport soon becomes bored and disillusioned by monotonous plots and the unimaginative stories of pulp magazines. https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the-voice-of-that-sf-master-stanislaw-lem/ https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the-voice-o... The hypotheses popular before the existence of the Project seemed to me incredibly shallow; they ricocheted back and forth between the pole of pessimism, which called the silentium universi a natural state, and the pole of mindless optimism that expected announcements clearly and slowly spelled out, as if civilizations scattered among the stars would communicate with one another like children in kindergarten. Yet another myth has bitten the dust, I thought, and yet another truth has ascended overhead — and, as is usually the case with truths, it is too much for us.
- kowdermeister 9y agoI just finished it during holiday, I loved the book. A film based on it is on the way: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4795062/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4795062/
- kagamine 9y agoGood sci-fi is good philosophy. A good companion to sci-fi is history. When people nay-say because we have no proof and 'given what we know today' I am reminded that most people didn't have electricity 150 years ago. The combustion engine is being superseded only 100 years after it became commonplace. Hell, 50-80 years ago half of England didn't have an indoors toilet and plumbing. What was the population of the US's tech-central, California, in 1850? The region was hardly populated. The last 500 years, and especially in the 20th century we have moved at an astounding rate, both technologically and socially. I have sci-fi books on my shelf from 40 years ago in which the population of Earth reaches 'critical' proportions at 5 billion. Nay-sayers at the time would never have accepted that we would reach over 7bn in 2016. Some HNers in the comments here clearly don't realize that a great many sci-fi writers have been scientists and cosmologists, professional and amateur, but dedicated to the science of the genre, and from there they take their starting point.
- rhcom2 9y ago> Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out. Anyone know how?
- revicon 9y agoI would guess mostly Occam's razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
- jerf 9y agoWhy would an alien civilization do this? And I don't just mean, come up with something that maybe some really powerful but really stupid alien civilization might conceivably do in a silly science fiction book. Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power. Even the old standby "well maybe they're just incomprehensible and we can't understand them" doesn't really work here because when we're talking about "incomprehensible" aliens we don't usually mean that they're incomprehensible on account of being cosmically stupid and wasteful. (I am speaking about what we actually have evidence for. If there's multiple exabytes of incredible data packed into this signal somehow we have no evidence for it. I like to distinguish very clearly between "things based on the evidence that we have" and "airy flights of fancy based on what might be hiding in the gaps", on the grounds that the latter is unbounded, so while they are fun in stories, in a way the very unlimited nature of the possible sets of speculations makes them uninteresting as an analysis of the real universe, all equally lost in the noise of all the other fantastic possibilities.)
- QAPereo 9y agoThis is the really interesting bit IMO In addition, their observations revealed that the brightest of these 15 emissions occurred at around 7 GHz. This was higher than any repeating FRBs seen to date, which indicated for the first time that they can occur at frequencies higher than previously thought. Last, but not least, the high-resolution data the Listen team collected is expected to yield valuable insights into FRBs for years to come. This was made possible thanks to the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, which is able to record several GHz of bandwidth simultaneously and split the information into billions of individuals channels. This enables scientists to study the proprieties and the frequency spectrum of FRBs with greater precision, and should lead to new theories about the causes of these radio emissions. So even if these particular signals should prove to not be extra-terrestrial in origin, Listen is still pushing the boundaries of what is possible with radio astronomy. And given that Breakthrough Listen is less than two years into its proposed ten-year survey, we can expect many more sources to be observed and studied in the coming years. If there’s evidence of ETI to be found, we’re sure to find out about it sooner or later!
- amygdyl 9y agoCant we see a way to backhaul radio telescope data from very remote locations, in the same way that Cloudflare is using asymmetric website traffic patterns? Is there any potential for collecting radio data inexpensively, I mean can we substitute network scale and geography to such a extent that commodity radio observatory is possible, in the 20 years to my retirement, or in my life, or beyond? I hear you loud and clear about the potential, but I am desperate to get a clue about how much the ramp will become steep and quick? Funny thing, if it weren't for the cheap and distributed way of inexpensive intelligence that had bombarded my senses with new information, I should be very possibly unaware of the potential for this immense explosion of discovery!
- ajross 9y agoI'm not sure what you're asking for specifically. For signals like the ones in the linked article, there's no way to observe them without a giant dish. Lots of antennas don't do anything for the problem when the noise is many orders of magnitude higher than the signal.
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoHere we go... dont get scared now...
- tgtweak 9y agoStrangely, or perhaps not, the most interesting part of this article to me was this: "Using the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, Dr. Gajjar and the Listen team observed FRB 121102 for five hours. From this, they accumulating 400 terabytes of data" That has to be one hell of an all flash array to take in that much data at a steady state of 22.75 GiB/s
- theoh 9y agoPaper describing the instrument: "The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A Wideband Data Recorder System for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope" https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06024 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06024
- rikkus 9y agoRelevant part: "Each storage server contains 36 hard drives, each with 6 TB capacity. These are configured as three 11-disk RAID 6 arrays plus 3 global hot swap spares."
- tgtweak 9y agoImpressive if you think in raid 6 you have double a single drive's write speed (not counting cache). They'd need 60+ of those arrays to ingest without back pressure.
- userbinator 9y agoA single spinning disk is already capable of >200MB/s sequential write: shttp://www.storagereview.com/wd_black_6tb_hdd_review http://www.storagereview.com/wd_black_6tb_hdd_review 100 of those in parallel will suffice to achieve >20GB/s, with roughly the same capacity of a few hundred TB.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIs use of 100 parallel disks at all standard? There has to be some overhead in processing, can you really just stripe across more disks and directly multiply the throughput? How much is that costing to run?
- hoodoof 9y agoA long time ago, in a ......
- andy_ppp 9y agoDoes anyone have a copy of the signal, be interesting to play with and how many bits of information were there etc.
- kowdermeister 9y agoThey have some data here and a nice plot :) http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%20be%20described%20in%20further%20detail%20in%20an%20upcoming%20scientific%20journal%20article http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%....
- andy_ppp 9y agoInteresting, looks like the plot of part of an orbit :-/
- sanatgersappa 9y agoE.T. phone home?
- gammarator 9y agoI don't know why this is getting a press release (beyond presumably the Milner support). FRBs are mysterious and cool, but this one was already localized and was already known to repeat. The higher-frequency detection is not too exciting. This isn't even a paper, just an "ATel"--roughly the scientific equivalent of a blog post.
- swilliams 9y agoBut is the frequency of the signals prime numbers?
- steeve 9y ago"And tell Willie to break out the big boy!"
- jacobush 9y agoI always thought an interesting experiment would be to fire off a handful of nuclear bombs in space. (Rather deep space, like well out of where they could do any harm to Earth.) Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers...
- Roritharr 9y agoWhy exactly would you want to draw attention to us?
- lin_lin 9y agoTo show that we're bad-ass
- squarefoot 9y agoIMO they already know. That's why they're waiting for us to evolve one more thousand years before contacting us.
- PoachedSausage 9y agoOr waiting for us to evolve enough to provide good sport.
- draugadrotten 9y agoNah, they're fattening us up to be the intergalactic version of Wagyu.
- rpmcmurphy 9y agoThe correct title here should be "Repeating radio noises coming from distant galaxy detected". The elephant in the room that SETI fans don't really want to admit is what if intelligence is actually not that smart, but is actually a viral form of stupidity that leads to self limiting catastrophe?
- EliRivers 9y agoDon't want to admit? Self-destruction is a pretty common posited solution to the Fermi paradox.
- PhantomGremlin 9y agoThe article has a completely unrelated image, captioned A colorful deep space image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in a NASA handout from June 3, 2014. There is no claim that the RFBs came from that area of space. That "colorful" image is a Hubble image that is incredible in its own right. It is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field The HUDF shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image – made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time – contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang.
- bleair 9y agoAre other astronomers confirming the origin of these FRBs? There's this example, where an unexplained signal turned out to be caused by a microwave oven: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-oven-caused-mystery-signal-plaguing-radio-telescope-for-17-years https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)
- Tepix 9y agoJust curious: If you wanted to plant a fake signal that looked like it were coming from a distant galaxy (say 3 billion ly), how far away from Earth would you have to place your transmitter?
- Rjevski 9y agoYou can be on Earth and just sabotage the deep space network antennas or radio telescopes or whatever they use to receive the signals to directly inject the signal in the processing pipeline.
- ntuch 9y agoDepends on how long the signal lasts. If it's continuous, there's no way to take it with a single transmitter. Astronomers can detect the apparent motion of stars caused by the earth's orbit, and use those measurements to triangulate the distance to stars, even though the stars are many light years away. A single transmitter on a probe near our solar system would be very obvious.
- GrumpyNl 9y agoIf there were aliens, we would have known with clear proof. If they are there, they are light years ahead and behind in technology and no need for crappy radio signal.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rgbrenner 9y agono need for crappy radio signal radio travels at the speed of light.... if the speed of light is a hard limit, that may be the best we will ever do
- Jeremy1026 9y agoThe article keeps mentioning "intelligent alien life" over and over, then closes with | Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out. Way to be a buzz kill.
- ge96 9y agoThe scale of the universe is depressing. Edit: because I feel that were stuck here for now. If Voyager took 40 years to exit our solar system. And solar system in galaxies and galaxies in the universe... It's a good thing I'm too busy being poor to be concerned about interstellar travel. It is mind blowing though... Way to quote pale blue dot... Everything we have ever known...
- noobermin 9y agoAt least you're not a paramecium, or an ant, or a dog, or a mollusk, or an electron. You have self-awareness which is something many things on many scales do not have. Not to mention, you can speak English (world's most used langauge), and have an internet connection. Hopefully, you make end's meet, and aren't starving in the street. Even on the scale of other sentient beings, things are all relative.
- ge96 9y agoHahaha hey man it's my right to complain. I just went to whole foods, live in a first world country. I do wonder is it better not to know. Yeah I could be a paramecium under a slide in some high school biology class.
- mda 9y agoIn the video, she says "even if 0.1% of habitable planets have life, you would expect over a million planets with some form of life." Where do we get this 0.1%? why it is not 10^-20% and probability of life in the galaxy is impossibly small?
- MrScruff 9y agoExactly. It's rather hard to estimate the probability of an event for which there is only one known example.
- gus_massa 9y agoEssentially, we have no clue. I'm optimistic that a bacteria like level is quite usual (like > 1e-6), but it baseless optimism. IANAA IANAB, IANAAB, ... This is the same problem that has the Drake equation: we don't have a good estimation of most of the factors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Criticism
- headcanon 9y agoI think that number was thrown out there as a "small" percentage, to highlight the (literally) astronomical numbers of possibilities. One model of getting to some percentage though is called the Drake equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
- mda 9y agoThe problem is, as you said, that it seems Drake and others like the sound of billions of stars in billion of galaxies, but when it comes to an unknown number for existence of life in a planet they pick a very optimistic number, to justify their thesis of abundance of life in universe. Maybe they take the earth as an example, the life existing under very harsh conditions and deduce that it should be a good probability given enough time. But I am skeptical of this.
- PoachedSausage 9y ago
- jcoffland 9y ago> Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out. In other words, none of the scientists want to sound like quacks. How could this possibly be "ruled out"? Oh right you put "largely" in front of it.
- knodi123 9y agoHow much effort did you put into answering "How could this possibly be "ruled out"?" before you assumed it was just a weaselly political decision?
- RedOrGreen 9y agoI guess this is cool, but not really that novel a result (and yeah, it's an ATel, not a paper yet, although that's just a matter of time). We've seen similar burst storms from this FRB source before, which is what allowed us to localize it in the first place. And I'm disappointed that they used the Hubble Deep Field - we have very nice deep images [1] of this field already. But yes, the Breakthrough digital hardware is really pretty neat! [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-burst-galaxy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-burst-...