Scientists have discovered a mathematical pattern in the so-called fast radio bursts coming from the depths of the Universe.
Short, but not clear
For several years now, astronomers and astrophysicists have been struggling to understand the origin of strange signals unlike anything known before. “Fast Radio Bursts” (FRB) – that’s what they are called. The first detection, purely accidental, was made in 2007 by astronomer Duncan Lorimer from West Virginia University in Morgantown. He discovered the signal while reviewing observational data from 2001. The signal, recorded by a radio telescope, lasted only a few milliseconds. Yet its power was colossal—equivalent to the energy the Sun produces in about a month, writes Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Five years passed before scientists realized that FRBs were not equipment glitches or interference, but real signals arriving from deep space. In 2012, British scientist Dan Thornton from the University of Manchester in England detected four more such signals.
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In 2014, an international team of scientists working with the world’s largest radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico announced the discovery of five more “Fast Radio Bursts,” similar to those described by Lorimer and Thornton.
The strange signals were initially detected in archival data.
All ten of these signals were discovered months, sometimes years, after they reached Earth. But in the current year—2015—astronomers led by Emily Petroff from Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, intercepted an FRB in real time. It was received at the Parkes Observatory using the 64-meter radio telescope (Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia). That is, they were present at the moment the signal arrived.
Ms. Petroff “sounded the alarm.” Within hours, dozens of telescopes around the world were pointed at the patch of sky from which the signal originated. But nothing further was found—not even faint residual radiation. There was nothing there.
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Five transmitters
The eleventh signal did not bring clarity. But together, all signals formed a data set suitable for analysis—recently conducted by Michael Hippke from the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned from the University of Hawaii in Manoa.
FRBs include both high- and low-frequency radio waves. It turned out that all detected signals follow a single pattern—the delay time of low frequencies relative to high frequencies is a multiple of 187.5.
Scientists cannot explain the meaning of this discovered pattern. They emphasize: no known astronomical objects possess such a characteristic.
By comparing the available signal data, Hippke and Learned determined that they originated from five different locations, either at the edges of our galaxy—the Milky Way—or in other galaxies.
We are being “winked at” by intelligent civilizations of Type III
Since no plausible astronomical candidates—such as anomalous pulsars or quasars—have been identified as sources of FRBs, scientists do not rule out that they might be artificial. If so, the signals could be sent by civilizations of Type II or even Type III.
Back in the 1960s, when humanity first aimed radio telescopes at the search for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence, Soviet astrophysicist and academician Nikolai Kardashev classified such civilizations. His classification, based on energy consumption levels, remains in use today.
According to Kardashev, Type I civilizations fully utilize the resources of their planet—harnessing all possible energy sources.
Type II civilizations command the energy of their local star, making them ten billion times more powerful than Type I civilizations.
Type III civilizations are omnipotent. They have found ways to harness the resources of an entire galaxy, including the energy of black holes. This makes them ten billion times more powerful than Type II civilizations and enables them to colonize neighboring star systems.
The scientist believed that some highly advanced civilizations arose billions of years before ours. Our own civilization, by the way, has not yet reached even Type I status, as we use only a tiny fraction of our planet’s energy resources and have not yet mastered, for example, nuclear fusion.
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Who knows, maybe FRB sources are spacecraft?
For Type III civilizations, powering transmitters that generate FRB pulses of colossal intensity would pose no problem. The question remains—what purpose do they serve? We cannot yet comprehend it. But the mere existence of such devices is encouraging. Perhaps advanced intelligent beings are communicating via them? Or traveling from one galaxy to another? And perhaps one day we will achieve the same—if nothing hinders our progress. Kardashev assures us: any civilization whose energy consumption grows by just one or two percent annually—as on Earth—can eventually reach both Type II and Type III levels. The transition to the next stage takes from several thousand to several tens of thousands of years. On cosmic scales, that’s merely a moment.
Hope flares up and fades
The current excitement in the scientific community caused by FRBs resembles the one that erupted in 1967. Then, Jocelyn Bell Burnell—a graduate student working in the group of British radio astronomer Antony Hewish—had the luck to detect strictly periodic pulses of modulated radio emission coming from deep space. The discovery was kept secret for several months because scientists believed they had finally intercepted an extraterrestrial message. The source was even nicknamed LGM-1—an abbreviation for “Little Green Men.” Soon, three more similar sources were found.
Unfortunately, it was later discovered that the radio signals were emitted by rapidly rotating neutron stars. Radiation is emitted in narrow beams. Due to rotation, these beams hit radio telescope dishes at regular intervals—appearing as pulses. This creates the illusion of a deliberate, meaningful transmission.
These radio sources became known as pulsars. Although suspicion of intelligent origin was dismissed by 1968, the discovery of pulsars was sensational. In 1974, Hewish received the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
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Most likely, FRB sources will also turn out to be exotic stars with peculiar behavior. But for now, there are still grounds to hope for extraterrestrials. The scientific paper in which Hippke and Learned analyzed the signals was titled “Cosmic radio plays an alien tune.”
Hippke and Learned, however, also propose another hypothesis—an alternative one. According to it, FRBs are indeed artificial in origin. But they are not sent by aliens, but by secret spy satellites. Operating in high orbits, they disguise information transmission as signals resembling those from astronomical objects.
On the other hand… who knows, perhaps even in the spy satellite version we shouldn’t forget about extraterrestrials. Maybe their satellites are disguised as such? And the signals are sent to aliens located on Earth, or on the Moon, or on Mars.
