6 ms·
"They found strong indications of a 157-day activity cycle; 121102 seems to flare up for 90 days and then go silent for 67, the team reported in a new study."
by bkrishnan 6y ago
"They found strong indications of a 157-day activity cycle; 121102 seems to flare up for 90 days and then go silent for 67, the team reported in a new study."
Maybe there's nothing to it, but both 157 and 67 are primes.
- MR4D 6y agoThey may be primes, but they are primes of an Earth day, which, as far as I am aware, is the only place where those numbers would be 157 & 67. As an example, our day on Earth is roughly 1440 minutes, while on Mars it is 1477 minutes. So on Mars it would be 153 & 65 day intervals. I deliberately chose the closest comparison to Earth. Had I chosen any other planet in our solar system, the numbers would have been much, much more different (on Jupiter it would be 406 & 173 days, respectively).
- fred_is_fred 6y agoPerhaps someone can find a planet where the timing is in the Fibonacci sequence relative to some local time measurement mechanism.
- sveme 6y agoNot that it means anything, but are you using Mars or Earth days for Mars?
- StavrosK 6y agoWhat do you mean? He's using Mars days, 1477 minutes long.
- imafish 6y agoMars days in Earth minutes >:)
- StavrosK 6y agoThere are no other minutes :P
- loktarogar 6y agono, those are Mars minutes
- slg 6y agoA "day" has no meaning anywhere but on Earth. So if you are going to make the leap that the usage of primes is a sign of intelligence, you would also have to believe that this message was meant for us and only us. However the burst seems to originate from 3 billion light-years away so they would have had to start sending the message very shortly after life began on the Earth. Seems incredibly unlikely. EDIT: Also an Earth day is not a constant value. It would have been much shorter 3 billion years ago and this cycle wouldn't be repeating in prime numbers. This theoretical alien intelligence would therefore need to not only be able to recognize life on Earth in the first few hundred million years it existed. It would also need to be able to accurately model the Earths orbit over the next 3 billion years in order to customize the message for when it would be received. All that work to send the message and they still needed to luck out that the 3 billion year journey happened to reach us at nearly the perfect time for our technology to advance enough so we could hear it.
- saalweachter 6y agoTimed to match the slowing of the Earth's rotation, no less.
- saas_sam 6y agoIt wouldn't have to do any of that if it was simply keeping an activity:non-activity ratio that resulted in 2 primes. I'm not sure to what degree of precision this flashing is happening but if it's very precise then there you go. 2 primes result no matter what your day/timescale/number system is.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoBut it's not, it's active for 90 days. You'd think they'd go for the trio.
- ncmncm 6y agoGood one. It is rare that two primes can be added to get a third prime. And one of them is always 2. :-)
- teraflop 6y agoAccording to the paper, the estimated period is 157 ± 7 days, so it's not meaningful to read anything into the precise number. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03596.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03596.pdf