New Radio Signal From Space, possible new WOW signal.

If this isn't an extra ordinary signal and merely another scream of a pulsar shouting at some black-hole? what does the Jerry R. Ehman 1977 15th of august Wow signal really mean then?

5.5 billion light years from us is way beyond the Milky Way Galaxy...here is from the OP's article:

"But the fact that we did not see light in other wavelengths eliminates a number of astronomical phenomena that are associated with violent events such as gamma-ray bursts from exploding stars and supernovae, which were otherwise candidates for the burst," explains Daniele Malesani.

"The theories are now that the radio wave burst might be linked to a very compact type of object -- such as neutron stars or black holes and the bursts could be connected to collisions or 'star quakes'. Now we know more about what we should be looking for," says Daniele Malesani.

Doesn't seem like a Wow signal to me...

a reply to: Aleister

With all due respect, your statement is about as well founded as my saying that I am the Dalai Lama. You don't know this to be true. It could be a span of time measured against glaciers, for all we know. It's a rather crude assumption you are making based off of our own hurbis as an intelligent race of sentient beings.

Here, let me add my own...

"And the primary decoding element we need...PEPPER!"




-NF

It's "another earth" with intelligent beings who, 5 billion years ago, just started expirementing with radio waves. We caught the result of their "experiment". In another few years we will get some kind of actual broadcast like the speech from Hitler which was our first broadcast sent out into space. If aliens are listening, that hitler speech will be the first thing they hear...

I wonder what their first intelligible radio broadcast will be? We must not judge it too harshly considering what our first real broadcast was...

Technically, I suppose our first broadcast the aliens would detect would be from the expirements conducted by the people who invented radio communication... maybe just little bursts like what we are getting now.

I wonder if there could be some process by which these radio waves could have been compressed down to these short bursts... like if the radio waves encountered something, natural or otherwise, on the long joirney through space. Maybe it encountered some other kind of waves and the collision squished it down, or it passed through some koind of electromagnetic storm like on that movie After Earth, or one of those crazy space storms/space phenomenon from star trek.

originally posted by: Akatsuki
A strange phenomenon has been observed by astronomers right as it was happening -- a 'fast radio burst'. The eruption is described as an extremely short, sharp flash of radio waves from an unknown source in the universe. The results have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

They're not new (the first one was detected in 2007) and they're almost certainly natural because the are wideband noise bursts. Lots of natural things emit wide band noise. Artificial radio transmitters are narrow band in nature, even spread spectrum is a series of narrowband signals.

So yeah, these are probably similar to pulsars (when they were discovered the researchers at first labelled them LGM for little green men), and gamma ray bursts which some briefly theorized could be the signature of massive alien anti-matter drives but we now know neither are mysterious at all.

Pulsars are spinning neutron stars and gamma ray bursts are mostly likely the result of merging neutron stars.

Sorry guys, these are probably not alien signals.

If you turn things around, the distance becomes more apparent:

While it’s interesting to imagine how far our radio signals have traveled into space, it’s extremely unlikely that an alien civilization will be able to catch the latest episode of ‘I Love Lucy’. This is thanks to the inverse square law. In Layman’s term, it’s a form of signal degradation.

As radio signals leave earth, they propagate out in a wave form. Just like dropping a stone in a lake, the waves diffuse or “spread out” over distance thanks to the exponentially larger area they must encompass. The area can be calculated by multiplying length times width which is why we measure it in square units – square centimeters, square miles, etc. This means that the further away from the source, the more square units of area a signal has to ‘illuminate’.inverse square law

Another way to think of it, is that the strength of a radio signal will be only 1/4 as great once you are twice the distance from the source. At ten times the distance, the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great.

Because of this inverse square law, all of our terrestrial radio signals become indistinguishable from background noise at around a few light-years from earth. For a civilization only a couple hundred light-years away, trying to listen to our broadcasts would be like trying to detect the small ripple from a pebble dropped in the pacific ocean off the coast of California – from Japan.

source

This means that if it was an alien civilization 5.5 bil. ly. away, they would have needed at least an entire galaxy, turned into pure energy to send it.. pretty expensive..oh and the dish size? .. ahh well, maybe there is some magic in that obscure dark matter/energy...

Here is a picture showing how far our radio waves can possibly have traveled so far



Maybe some of our tv-signals will somehow be turned directly back at us from a small distant black hole, or many huge stars in a perfect setting, in the future. We will then hear/see faint signals from our past

We had better hope it's not alien in origin. Imagine a species with 5.5 BILLION years of technological advancement over us. They would have had to have evolved extremely quickly, and would be so far beyond us we would not even be ants to them.

With that said, nothing here points to intelligent life.

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04
Imagine a species with 5.5 BILLION years of technological advancement over us. They would have had to have evolved extremely quickly, and would be so far beyond us we would not even be ants to them.

Yes. And that's the thing a lot of people on this forum I don't think seem to understand. If we were to meet any aliens or even intercept some thing produced by their technology the chances are they are going to be billions of years older than us because we and our solar system are relatively newcomers.

On average most planets in our Milky Way galaxy are around 2 billion years older than our Earth and solar system. Assuming that there was nothing abnormal about the pace of life starting and evolving on Earth then an intelligent species from beyond our solar system is very likely billions and at the very least millions of years ahead of us.

It's simple mathematics.

Galaxy is 13 billion years old
Solar System including Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Most planets in the galaxy are 6.5 or more (in some cases 10 billion) years old.

Ants we are.

a reply to: JadeStar

Quite honestly it's almost amazing to think about what will happen in the next 100 years. Imagine near 6 BILLION years of advancement. What would be possible is beyond terrifying.

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04
a reply to: JadeStar

Quite honestly it's almost amazing to think about what will happen in the next 100 years. Imagine near 6 BILLION years of advancement. What would be possible is beyond terrifying.

Even more interesting is to think about what we might be able to detect from such old civilizations.....

Check this out: Searching for the ruins of alien civilizations

a reply to: JadeStar

How can you possibly know how old "most planets in the Galaxy" are?

While I agree with the sentiment that most Alien life we will eventually encounter will be older than us, there is no way you can possibly know the age of the planets without actually having travelled there and do the same geological work we have done on our own planet to determine it's age.

originally posted by: stumason
a reply to: JadeStar

How can you possibly know how old "most planets in the Galaxy" are?

Because planets form as a product of star formation (we know this because we can see young planets forming out of disks in the infrared consistent with our models) and we know how old the stars are through a number of techniques (see below) For instance young stars spin faster than older stars. They also put out distinctive signatures in the spectra of the light we receive from them which tell us they are newer or older.

Additionally, all the planets in our solar system are roughly the same age and the same age as the Sun. They are well studied and our solar system is not a special case. Planets are not the exception, they're the rule and are the same ages as stars for the most part.

While I agree with the sentiment that most Alien life we will eventually encounter will be older than us, there is no way you can possibly know the age of the planets without actually having travelled there and do the same geological work we have done on our own planet to determine it's age.

Perhaps you should do a bit of reading here. It's basic astronomy.

Stellar Age Estimation

and

Sun-like stars reveal their ages.

very interesting
but if its the real deal how will we ever know?

originally posted by: Silcone Synapse
a reply to: Akatsuki
Lets hope its not like this:
Another planet in the depths of the void just like ours,with intelligent life-they have tamed radio waves for communication just like us two legged freaks on what we call "Earth".

They use a kind of encryption burst format,that is as yet beyond our knowledge and capabilities.
We have recieved a transmission,and with time we shall decode it.

Lets hope it is a friendly species.
Although the odds are against that.

Considering that humanity has never encountered another intelligent species from beyond our own planet, what are you basing those odds on exactly?

And don't tell me we've been visited by greys, greens, purples, anunaki, and other nonsense.
Because there is absolutely no substantiated proof or evidence or facts to support these claims, just BS misinformation.

Believing, and hoping there is intelligent species out there that we can one day make contact with, or they with us, is one thing, convincing your self these things have already happened is entirely another.

originally posted by: buster2010

originally posted by: strongfp

originally posted by: buster2010

originally posted by: strongfp

originally posted by: Aleister
If you are hinting that it may be an alien signal, then the thing to do would be to slow down the recording of the signal by tens or hundreds of times. A short burst to us could be a Seinfeld episode to the folks on the other end. Or thousands of times, and you get "The English Patient".

A radio wave that fast would be on par with a blue tooth signal.
If it were TV show or a song, or a recording, it would not be that fast.

That's by our technology. If it were a civilization that is a million or even a billion years more advanced than we are that signal could hold as much information as the library of congress.

Radio waves don't hold that much information. Radio waves are created in nature all the time a short bust simply means it has a chance it's not natural.

Please understand that humans have only taken a few baby steps on a thousand mile journey when it comes to understanding the universe. Our knowledge of how radio wave can be manipulated is limited to our knowledge of them. There could be information imprinted on every sub atomic particle.

That's only how you see it. For all we know we are the most intelligent. Or most primitive, but, we are pretty darn advanced in my books.

we are pretty darn advanced in my books.

That's setting the bar quite low considering the state of our planet and population.

a reply to: roadgravel

Watch him swear at you now.

Uhm, guys? Girls?

Did you notice the distance? 6.000.000.000 lightyears!

And that thing about "about the same energy in that microsecond burst like our sun produces in a day"?


Do you realize that there is NO WAY that a planet-based technology could emanate such a burst?
Even if it was a very focused beam radio transmission, if would use up more energy than there is in a whole planet - yes, IN a planet! No way is this a artificial signal of a planetary society - and a population which has already left its homeplanet to expand into other solarsystems should have the technology to neglect those pesky slow radiotransmissions...

BTW: haven't seen Phage for quite some time, is s/he still around?

The fact that they have found the exact same kind of signals billions of light years apart would suggest they are detecting a natural phenomena.

Korg.

Probably a "blast" from black hole merger, redshifted out to radio wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. Migh have even been two galactic supermassive black holes merging.