Researchers Detect Repeating Fast Radio Bursts From Three Billion Light Years Away
Jonathan Fuller | September 01, 2017
The Green Bank Telescope used to detect the FRBs.Breakthrough Listen—a program seeking intelligent extraterrestrial communications—has detected 15 fast radio bursts coming from a dwarf galaxy some three billion light years from Earth.
In the early hours of August 26, UC Berkeley Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Vishal Gajjar detected the signals coming from FRB 121102, an extragalactic source of radio bursts first discovered in 2012. Gajjar culled the signals from a 400 TB data set he collected using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are brief, bright radio pulses from other galaxies. The FRBs detected on August 26 are higher in frequency than previous ones, at around 7 GHz. According to a Breakthrough Listen press release, our local Solar System was only two billion years old when the signal originated, and life on Earth consisted solely of single-celled organisms.
FRB detection first occurred in 2007 and has been sporadic since then, so the source of these emissions is purely speculative. Some scientists believe they may be the result of collisions between two very dense objects like black holes, or the result of gamma-ray bursts. Others believe they may be artificial and could point to signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
If you got nothing after the Cray computer deciphered the signals, then it was not Russian in origin. Three billion years old or not, we still suspect intelligent manipulation of these otherwise benign natural signals could be interpreted several ways.
If ET is (er was) reaching out way back then, where is he/she now?
Who would they have been attempting to reach out to? How could really intelligent life have evolved that early in the Universe? Perhaps if Sentient Being Intiated Signals (SBIS), they could have been emitted to 4Π and not coherent, or they could have been coherently aimed, but just incidentally aimed in our direction.
Anyone else with information on this?