By: Soul:Ask | Guest Post
Three days ago, about 25 repeating FRBs were reported by 57 astronomers from the University of Toronto, working with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope.
Fast radio bursts, FRBs, are among the brightest flares in the universe. Bursts mainly emit radio waves. These flares are so powerful that radio telescopes can detect them even from more than 4 billion light-years away. Constant visibility at such vast distances means that the bursts contain a huge amount of energy.
Many astronomers believe that neutron stars emit FRB’s. The density and strength of the magnetic field of these extremely compact stars is unique in the universe. By studying them, astronomers seek to better understand the fundamental properties of the matter that makes up the universe. But learning FRBs is hard as no one knows where in the sky the next one will sound and none of the known ones today is capable of independently generating such strange signals in a natural way.
Messages in Universe
FRBs behave, to put it mildly, strange. The duration is different – from a fraction of a millisecond to several seconds. Some change frequency. Others, while starting the “transmission”, increase their power hundreds of times, send signals in different directions. Some are polarized, some are not. Most of the sources so far “get in touch” only once, and then seem to disappear, some times without a trace but not necessarily forever.
Their number has been growing since 2018, when only one repeating signal was detected. They are now multiplying and literally began to pour in hundreds from all sides.
There are sources that “broadcast” regularly from one place, but with long, different interruptions. The “firstborn” FRB 180916, for example, is turned on every 16.35 days. And there are very active ones having tremendous power. It is enough for the signal to be able to flash billions of light-years of interstellar space. According to a rough estimate, the capacity of one FRB is 10 trillion times the annual energy consumption of the entire population of the Earth. In other words, a complete mess today.
They are caught not only by CHIME but by numerous antennas of other radio telescopes installed around the globe. The FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) observatory alone, located in China, received 1800 FRBs in a few days in 2021. A year earlier, 1650 FRBs “arrived”. In addition to the Chinese, signals are caught by numerous other largest radio telescopes such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), Very Large Array, European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network.
Artificial Origins
It is not surprising that many quite serious astronomers, perplexed, did not rule out that FRBs are of artificial origin. That is, they testify to some kind of technological activity of highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations.
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, led by Avi Loeb, are proposing artificial transmitters the size of our Earth or even larger as FRB sources. Scientists believe that aliens send short and powerful pulses to their starships, which are equipped with appropriate receivers or just supply energy.
Loeb and colleagues calculated that the power of flashes should be enough to move spaceships weighing a million tons – 20 times heavier than the largest terrestrial ocean liner.
If so, then the aliens have become much more active in recent times. Where and why? Are they not fighting? This is not the time to abandon such a hypothesis. After all, there are also no less mysterious gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – X-rays of incredible power and lethal force, coming, like FRBs, from the depths of the Universe.
What objects generate directed energy pulses, the sources of which are second only to the Big Bang in strength? In a few seconds, they release as much energy as the Sun produces in billions of years. Scientists do not exclude that the Earth from time to time finds itself in the line of fire, which is conducted by warring alien battle stations – like the “death star” from Star Wars.
Recently, on October 9, 2022, what seems to be the most powerful salvo in the history of observations was recorded. It was called BOAT – “Brightest Of All Time”. The source was located in the constellation Arrow, 2.4 billion light years from our planet, but the radiation that reached it caused a disturbance in the upper atmosphere.
Alternatively, extraterrestrials could just communicate like that – through FRBs and GRBs. Some astronomers do believe that flares carry some information but which one?
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READ MORE: A New FRB Signal Has Buzzed Nearly 2,000 Times In Just Two Months, Raising A Mystery
Read more on Alien Activity: The World Is Waiting. Are They Already Here? An “Alien Mother Ship Is Studying Earth Right Now”
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