13 ms·
Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
- aquova 6y agoMy first thought was that this sounds like a pulsar, and I was surprised to not see that among the list of possible phenomenon. After looking it up, I still wasn't quite sure why these couldn't be pulsars. Is it because the period is much higher than typical pulsars?
- teraflop 6y agoThe article suggests it could be a spinning neutron star, which is what a pulsar is. But a pulsar produces an extremely regular sequence of pulses. (Well, actually it emits a continuous beam of radio waves, but its rotation causes the beam to point towards any given observer at regular intervals.) This article describes a source that seems to start and stop at regular intervals of several days (much longer than any known pulsar's rotational period) but within the active intervals, the bursts appear to be random. That suggests a more complex mechanism is at work.
- rootbear 6y agoI just throw some gasoline on the "It must be Aliens!" theory (to which I do not subscribe!) and point out that heavily compressed data looks random...
- menybuvico 6y agoAs does encrypted data.
- beamatronic 6y agoThat’s why somebody needs to send out a sequence of prime numbers
- lumost 6y agoWhat protocol do you use to represent the sequence? Bytes, Morse, Amplitude modulation, frequency modulation? All of these combinations may appear random to one without the right codec.
- 0-_-0 6y ago1 is 1 blip, 2 is 2 blips, etc. just like in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system
- beamatronic 6y agoI wonder if this could be accomplished with a train of satellites. All in the same orbit. Just spaced out like this: xx xxx xxxxx xxxxxxx So they just go around and around, including the light, from the point of view of a far away perspective
- cgriswald 6y agoYou would need to set up the satellites in such a way that anyone receiving your message is viewing their orbits edge on. Your satellites would also have to be extremely large and fairly close to your host star. And there’d have to be no dust between your star and the receiver. As a method to communicate with people you don’t know exist, it’s not very good because chances are they won’t be viewing your satellites edge on. For people you know are there, it’s needlessly complicated and expensive. If you’re going to go to the trouble, you’d be better off making a Dyson swarm and cloaking your star completely. You’d get energy back and be just as detectable for a civilization that thought to compare visible and IR sources (which some Earth scientists have done, with negative results).
- namarie 6y agoIt would take 500 million years to get there, if the signal was strong enough in the first place.
- anoniuyiu33412 6y ago
- elwell 6y agoCompression is just a bad encryption algorithm. Encryption is just a bad compression algorithm.
- nabla9 6y agoOne explanation might be a pulsar circling something.
- jrichardshaw 6y agoPulsars aren't 100% ruled out, but I think they're considered reasonably unlikely. The problem is mostly the apparent brightness. If you place almost any known pulsar (which are all in our galaxy) at the in the host galaxy of a localised FRB which(only a fraction of FRB's do we have measured distances for, but they're all quite far away), if would be far too dim. The only exception to this is the Crab pulsar, which is observed to occasionally have "giant pulses" which are 1000s of times brighter than a typical pulse. If you put the a somewhat brighter version of the Crab pulsar in an FRB host galaxy at the low end of the known distances, you might just about be able to see it.
- perlgeek 6y agoSince it hasn't come up yet: whenever a new astronomical phenomenon is detected, people think "Aliens!" as the reason. In fact, when the first pulsar was discovered, it was (somewhat jokingly) called LGM-1 for "little green men". I'm sure the news hype cycle will come up with similar ideas this time, and I'm just as sure that we'll find a perfectly reasonable explanation not involving intelligent, extraterrestrial life forms.
- abc_lisper 6y agoUntil one day when it becomes true ..
- zoomablemind 6y agoWe should beam back our commercials at them... they may just change their mind and switch to ads-free alternative.
- JJMcJ 6y ago"Earth Peoples, we come for the secret of the ShamWow"
- biesnecker 6y agoWe have searched the galaxy and discovered that it indeed cannot be found in stores.
- Jestar342 6y agoSome of the earliest radio broadcasts are Hitler's speeches, as well as other world leaders preparing their nations for global conflict. So there's that.
- dogma1138 6y agoThat would be TV broadcasts as I’m guessing everyone here seen Contact. Ironically in 1948 when FM was standardized and countries were assigned spectrums Germany wasn’t really invited as it wasn’t a state for that short period and wasn’t assigned a spectrum so they started broadcasting in VHF because that wasn’t covered by the Copenhagen Agreement. A few years later people realized that VHF was supper efficient for FM unlike AM and (W)Germany ended up holding all the cards. This is why (primarily older) VHF FM radio compatible receivers in Europe will have UKW FM or UKW option in the turner which stands for Ultrakurzwelle (Ultra short wave) that was before UHF was standardized above the VHF spectrum.
- JackFr 6y ago> For the most part, these detections were one-offs, flashing briefly before disappearing entirely. I realize there is most likely an explanation that doesn’t require intelligent alien life, but that screams Dark Forest Theory.
- EamonnMR 6y agoWe should broadcast the coordinates of a distant star to see what happens.
- vmladenov 6y agoThere are a lot of cool concepts in those books, but the sophon faster-than-light communication that props up a lot of the story was a bit too much for me.
- ganstyles 6y agoThe theory of quantum entanglement is sound though, and it took a while for a single sophon to arrive before the FTL communication. Layman here, but I thought it was relatively had science/speculative fiction.
- mkl 6y agoUnfortunately the sound theory of quantum entanglement disallows FTL communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
- airstrike 6y ago> There are a lot of cool concepts in those books Which books, if I may ask?
- aneesh297 6y agoThe Three Body Problem and it's sequels by Liu Cixin. The series is called "Remembrance of Earth's Past".
- zargath 6y agoProbably just some aliens from some advanced civilization Far far away.
- bcardarella 6y agoAnd presumably all gone by now
- savrajsingh 6y agoThey didn’t mention a simpler solution: random emitter orbits behind something / Is occluded for the silent period?
- teraflop 6y agoI'm having a hard time imagining what kind of geometry would cause an orbiting object to be occluded for more than 50% of its orbital period.
- m3kw9 6y agoAnother day, another periodic pulse detected
- bawana 6y agoIf aliens did exist, they would probably compress their communications. And they might use a fault tolerant infrastructure like TCP/IP. In either scenario, real communications would not be periodic but closer to random noise. Has anyone performed a Zipf plot or calculated shannon entropy of non-periodic radio signals?
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoWhat if they use error coding? My pet theory for a while has been that they use point-to-point communications (lasers), rather than wasteful omnidirectional radio waves, so that you have to get very lucky in order to eavesdrop on them.
- Santosh83 6y agoNot if they wanted to specifically send out a beacon to other aliens.
- dylan604 6y agoExactly. If you wanted to get someone's attention, you make your signal something that would standout from all of the background noise. If someone send a RCPT signal back, then you could consider sending a more complicated signal.
- koheripbal 6y agoWhy would an advanced intelligence advertise its location? It is a high-risk low-reward strategy.
- EamonnMR 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangerous_to_communicate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangerou...
- anoniuyiu33412 6y agoMaybe the transmitter is located far away from their civilization's main location. It should be a stronghold, just for comms, fully expendable, probably with no information in any local hard/soft/wetware about where they actually reside. If we answer, we would be probably be talking to "a phone tapped to another phone"
- jcims 6y agoDoes it sound like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkbekhUdw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkbekhUdw4 Yes, you know what it is. :D
- Intermernet 6y agoWithout clicking on it, my guess is either the signal from Contact, or Rick Astley.
- DrBazza 6y agoIf it's periodic, it's something orbiting something. If it's powerful enough to be seen 500 million ly away, one of the two orbiting objects is going to be a black hole.
- CuriouslyC 6y agoMaybe, but perhaps not in the way you think. A source that emits radiation only at certain angles (think a stellar disco ball) would only "flash" us infrequently as we moved relative to it.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOr one thing rotating. You can imagine other cyclical processes, but I don't know any are realistic.
- DFHippie 6y agoThe thing to explain then, in either the precession or the orbiting case, is the variability in the period.
- pas 6y agoVariable stars, something involving a cyclic phase transition (from silent to active and back). Something like the Type Ia supernova, where the dense white dwarf siphons off mass from its companion until it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit and bang.
- jrichardshaw 6y agoThere's a few ways to do it (and the press release is surprisingly good and mentions most of them), but certainly one of the more obvious explanations is that the emitting object, is in a binary system with some other object, and that modulates the emission mechanism somehow. I don't think either needs to be a black hole though. What I consider the most plausible candidate for emission is probably magnetars (i.e. neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields), and there's no reason the companion would need to be a black hole either, you just need a companion that gives a 16 day orbit and that's very easy to do with another star or neutron star.
- squarefoot 6y agoShouldn't they be able to discriminate the type of object (single star with orbiting planets that obstruct radio waves, or dual star plus planets where the emitter itself also moves around an orbit) by analyzing the received carrier frequency and see if it's also modulated by a much lower frequency (Doppler effect) compatible with orbital motion?
- teraflop 6y agoFRBs don't really have a "carrier frequency" in that sense. The radio burst occurs a broad range of frequencies, which can vary substantially from one burst to the next (there are graphs of this in the paper linked above). But there's no sharp peak that can be accurately measured, as far as I know. And even if there was, we don't understand the mechanism behind FRBs, so we wouldn't necessarily be able to distinguish a Doppler shift from some other effect that caused the frequency to change.
- beamatronic 6y agoIt seems to me there’s no limit to what we can learn by observing outer space.
- anoniuyiu33412 6y agoAt some point we could be lucky enough to spot some kind of alien ISS orbiting an otherwise non-interesting planet/moon. Or some kind of giant vessel arriving to a close star. Could be no luck at all too.
- sradman 6y agoarxiv Jan 28 paper "Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source" [1] via Feb 7 Vice article [2] and Wikipedia "Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)" page [3]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10275 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10275 [2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-deep-space-is-sending-signals-to-earth-in-steady-16-day-cycles https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-deep-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Hydrogen_Intensity_Mapping_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Hydrogen_Intensity_Ma...
- HenryKissinger 6y agoGet Jodie Foster in here.
- b34r 6y ago“It’s like clockwork”. Probably a natural source then
- cosmic_ape 6y agoIsn't it strange that the periods mentioned are integer multiples of days? Don't known much about astronomy, but day as a unit of time is just a constant specific to our particular solar system. I guess a function of the sizes of the sun and the planets here. There should be nothing special about it. To think that 500M light years away there is something that has similar time proportions to be observed here as periodic is amazing by itself.
- qayxc 6y agoThe period is 16.35 +/-0.18 days [1] so it's not exactly 16 days. The unit days is just the next best convenient unit to use for this range of time scale. 392 hours +/- 4 hours just isn't as intuitive as 16 days. So the period is neither an integer multiple of days, nor exactly the same each time. There's some small variance involved - about 1%. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRB_180916.J0158%2B65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRB_180916.J0158%2B65
- modzu 6y agoFRBs seem to make the front page of hn on a repeating cycle too lol
- jrichardshaw 6y agoOne of paper authors here. I'll try and answer some of the questions in the comments. It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.
- magicMonkeyPaw 6y agoare you looking forward to reading all the crazy people's takes on why it's actually aliens that you found?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoAlways! I think astronomers often make it worse. I mean, we like thinking about why things are actually aliens as much as anyone else (LGM1 was already mentioned), and while we mostly try to restrain ourselves, every now and again a famous astronomer breaks and lets out a paper about it.
- plutonorm 6y agoThat's great to hear! If some credible evidence of aliens did appear, where do you think it would come from? Tabby's Star like data? atmospheric spectra? FRB's? other? Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts :)
- antepodius 6y agoMy guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.
- tartoran 6y agoIf it’s regular like clockwork it’s nothing but a cog in the universe we’re looking at, all in all interesting to study. Next irregular signal will be even more interesting though that does not necessarily imply alien communication
- admiralspoo 6y agoWhat a garbage press release for 6 month old news. MIT's reputation continues to decline.
- jrichardshaw 6y agoTo be slightly fair, the policies of the journals have a lot to do with this. I'll try and explain: This paper was submitted to Nature as it would be fairly high profile, and Nature does now allow you to put in on the arXiv at submission, which was done in January. Since then it has been going through peer review, and being queued up to get published in the journal which finally happened on June 17th. However, during that whole time there is a press embargo. So although you may have seen it back in January, that was because a few outlets picked it up by scanning the arXiv themselves, and no one within the collaboration has been allowed to talk about it to the press, and no universities to publicise it in the intervening time. That embargo has presumably just been lifted which is why this is all coming out now. Because of the embargo you wouldn't have seen quotes and comments from people involved in the initial coverage back in January, and even if I'd noticed it getting posted to HN back in January I would have not been allowed to comment on it like I'm doing now.
- mef51 6y agoThe data for this discovery as well as other work from CHIME/FRB is available here: https://chime-frb-open-data.github.io/ https://chime-frb-open-data.github.io/
- magneticnorth 6y agoEarth has had life for more maybe as long as 4 billion years, and in all that time there has been less than 200 years when a species had the intelligence, the motivation, and the technological advancement to send communications into space. I know the odds of this being life are (literally) astronomically low, but every time I hear news like this, I can't help hoping there's another species out there that found the will & the way to reach out.
- 7thaccount 6y agoSame feelings. It's never aliens, but it sure would be cool to meet a benevolent super advanced species or catch an intergalactic soap opera with octopus people. Really, any indication that we're not alone.
- anoniuyiu33412 6y agoWe are not :-)
- 7thaccount 6y agoGiven the size of the Universe, I would guess this as well 10/10, but so far we have zero evidence. I wonder if we're all destined to stay within our own solar systems due to the light speed barrier, or if we'll ever figure out how to do FTL or bend space. It's frustrating that we can't seem to break out of our tiny bubble. Maybe there is a prime directive that has nothing to do with a species achieving warp, but instead attempts to see if a species can work together on a planetary scale to tackle disease, hunger, energy, climate...etc? If so, we're doing a poor job, but are making progress.
- baxtr 6y ago> This new FRB source, which the team has catalogued as FRB 180916.J0158+65, is the first to produce a periodic, or cyclical pattern of fast radio bursts. The pattern begins with a noisy, four-day window, during which the source emits random bursts of radio waves, followed by a 12-day period of radio silence. The astronomers observed that this 16-day pattern of fast radio bursts reoccurred consistently over 500 days of observations. I wonder how these aliens manage to work only for 4 days and then rest for almost 2 whole weeks. They must be quite advanced.
- undersuit 6y agoWell the aliens producing the Soap being broadcast probably work during the whole 2 weeks before they release the newest episode.
- historyremade 6y agoThe search for Aliens within Aliens just insane.
- historyremade 6y agoThe search for aliens within aliens just insane. They've communicated with us for years. The idea itself a communication. It's matter of time until we get more civilized.
- nibbula 6y agoSad we won't be able to visit for a least 450 million years. Nice of Canada to give us all that juicy data.
- masked_titan 6y ago>500 million light years away How are they able to know how far it's coming from?
- unnouinceput 6y agohttps://sciencing.com/calculate-distance-light-5974042.html https://sciencing.com/calculate-distance-light-5974042.html
- unnouinceput 6y agoLet's run wild some imagination. So 500 million light years as distance, meaning it started at least 500 millions years ago. Dinosaurs weren't existing back then. Imagine a civilization which has this energy output that is detected 500 million light years away. Wasn't some quote where a type 4 civilization technology is indistinguishable from natural phenomenons?
- once-in-a-while 6y agoYou probably never heard about it, but there is a religious believe that when the earth was still a Paradise (right after Creation of mankind), people could actually hear beautiful music coming from the stars! This was made possible by the (now gone, but present before the Flood) layer of extremely cold and perfectly solid ice around our planet, which also filtered out UV light (which is well known to be one of the causes of ageing).
- anoniuyiu33412 6y agoDidn't read the whole thread just yet. but, to the point. So, it's aliens. what would they possible be communicating? What kind of information would actually matter to communicate over 500 million light years? I bet it would be: a way to reply I wouldn't bother to try to send intructions for them - us - to build another 500 million light-year capable transmitter, But maybe, just maybe, they could be sending information for making us able to build a wormhole. A we'd know where the other extreme would be located, so we "just" need to build one and point it to them.
- tpmx 6y agoTime to watch Contact (1997) for the 5th time.