Sunday 13 January 2019

More Signals from Space

A new series of fast radio bursts have been discovered by CHIME- the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. These transient radio pulses coming from space were first discovered in the 1960's and since then many others have been detected. They can be detected from a great distance, sometimes billions of light-years, meaning that they must be extremely powerful; see the background links below. Astronomers are not entirely sure what causes them, although some sources have been identified, such as pulsars. There are other possibilities, such as rotating neutron stars, two or more neutron stars colliding, a neutron star turning into a black hole, a black hole itself... and finally aliens; cue the Giorgio Tsoukalos memes! However Dr Ingrid Stairs, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia, says that this is unlikely because the FRB's come from many different parts of the sky. "It just seems completely inconceivable that there could be that many different alien civilisations all deciding to produce the same kind of signal in the same way. That just seems highly improbable." she said. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46825450. However this assumes that the extraterrestrials have not travelled great distances through the cosmos and possibility even have an intergalactic empire. If they are millions of years in advance of humans technologically then why shouldn't this be considered? It is neither inconceivable nor improbable.

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