Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space

originally posted by: blackmetalmist
a reply to: jonnywhite

I think that like most things on the Earth, what we initially think is damaging, may actually help us out in the long run. I think that they should continue monitoring this so called signal and it continues, they may want to eliminate other options before jumping to any conclusions. This very well could be a pulsar or a white dwarf.

This could be the call we are all waiting for. There seems to be something shifting in the way we all think and the way life feels. As mentioned in another thread, we are all now experiencing some time of "deja vu, dreamlike state".

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm not experiencing anything of the sort. Please don't speak for me ever again

originally posted by: theabsolutetruth
a reply to: jonnywhite

I know of a researched that was told to shut up about certain signals and a mundane explanation given. They weren't mundane signals nor were they explainable unless from extraterrestrial intelligence sources and purposeful as there wasn't uniformity, a pattern was established. IMO there is more communication than that which filters to MSM.

I have a very, very hard time believing stories like this. If one person noted the signals, others would as well. The sky is bog and is watched by many, many people at all times. The odds of just one person or one listening station detecting a signal from space is almost nil.

originally posted by: jaffo

originally posted by: theabsolutetruth
a reply to: jonnywhite

I know of a researched that was told to shut up about certain signals and a mundane explanation given. They weren't mundane signals nor were they explainable unless from extraterrestrial intelligence sources and purposeful as there wasn't uniformity, a pattern was established. IMO there is more communication than that which filters to MSM.

I have a very, very hard time believing stories like this. If one person noted the signals, others would as well. The sky is bog and is watched by many, many people at all times. The odds of just one person or one listening station detecting a signal from space is almost nil.

Not to mention, the whole act of confirming such a signal exists in the first place would involve people at multiple radio observatories (and places big enough to detect such a signal typically are widely known in the astronomical community), often on separate continents.

People who think SETI could "cover up" a signal really don't understand how it works. They wouldn't even know they had a signal unless they got confirmation from other sites which right there makes your signal-not-so-secret.

The act of tracking such a signal over a 24 hr period would also involve multiple sites as the source rose and set at any one location so again...this kinda would rule out any sort of conspiracy to hide the signal.

As the saying goes, you can't hide the sky.

originally posted by: ngchunter
The signals are almost certainly artificial in nature, whether man made or ET. If ET though, they are purposefully being sent to earth; the mean arrival time of these signals is strongly correlated to integers of earth time, specifically our seconds as a unit of measurement. The average arrival time of fast radio bursts at 1500 MHz (because of the dispersion the arrival time is frequency-dependent) are -.12 +/- 0.08s relative to integer seconds of UT.
arxiv.org...
That is almost certainly not a coincidence.

I beg to differ. While not a coincidence that does not mean the signals are artificial. There could be some unknown astrophysical process which explains that correlation which happens to be coincide with our frame of reference.

The signals are almost certainly natural. They are broadband in nature:

from: ArXiv: FAST RADIO BURST DISCOVERED IN THE ARECIBO PULSAR ALFA SURVEY

FRB 121102 exhibited all of the characteristics expected for a broadband, dispersed pulse, and therefore clearly stood out from al lother candidate events that appeared in the pipeline output for large DMs.

I'd love these signals to be ET but it just doesn't look like that's what they are because:

#1 They're broadband in nature, like pulsars.

#2 They don't seem to correspond to any actual known astrophysical objects (yet). One would think such powerful alien transmitters would at least be near a star or some other visible component not in the middle of interstellar (or rather, intergalactic space).

#3 They don't correspond to the galactic plane so they are most likely extra-galactic (coming from outside the Milky Way).

#4 In order to be observed as strong as they are they'd have to be coming from some extremely powerful, almost unbelievably powerful radio transmitters.

Probably not ET phoning us...

I hope I am wrong though.

originally posted by: droneonline
It seems funny that 187,5 could be pointing to the year 1875 as another member mentioned - the year of the first real audio recording by Edison.

What's even more interesting is that when you're working with nowadays audio recording technology (like I do on a daily basis), you will be working with high "samplerates" to digitize analog signals.

The most common high definition samplerates are 48 kHz (48000 Hz), 96 kHz (96000 Hz) and even 192 kHz (192000 Hz, for REALLY high resolution).

And funnily..all these samplerates can be devided by 187,5 in a nice way:

187,5 x 256 = 48 000
187,5 x 512 = 96 000
187,5 x 1024 = 192 000

Whatever that means.....I just thought it was a strange coincidence.....

187.5 Mhz is commonly used in crystal clock oscillators too...

www.onsemi.com...

Just google 187.5 Mhz

a reply to: blackmetalmist

I doubt it's ET they are probably past using electromagnetic waves to communicate. Its like us looking for people on earth that use smoke signals.

originally posted by: droneonline
It seems funny that 187,5 could be pointing to the year 1875 as another member mentioned - the year of the first real audio recording by Edison.

What's even more interesting is that when you're working with nowadays audio recording technology (like I do on a daily basis), you will be working with high "samplerates" to digitize analog signals.

The most common high definition samplerates are 48 kHz (48000 Hz), 96 kHz (96000 Hz) and even 192 kHz (192000 Hz, for REALLY high resolution).

And funnily..all these samplerates can be devided by 187,5 in a nice way:

187,5 x 256 = 48 000
187,5 x 512 = 96 000
187,5 x 1024 = 192 000

Whatever that means.....I just thought it was a strange coincidence.....

Nice find there. Something like that would be a way to occasionally throw in an analog signal that's otherwise digitally encoded. Perhaps a simple but occasional waveform chirp? One of the papers on the signal also finds it's often time synching to earth seconds. Instead of a really strong distant signal, it could be something local but spread out. In which case, multiple satellites broadcasting the same thing synchronously. (I would guess that radio telescopes might not be able to sort that out with the current configuration if it's not expected.) Perhaps it's GPS or some other military system?

Thinking along the lines of that, maybe it's something like this being used to counter jamming?

The only thing that is keeping me from just saying right now that I think this is an intelligent signal is the magnitude of energy involved here. That seems a bit odd. But other than that, this is genuinely intriguing. If nothing else, this year has shown at least me that we know next to nothing about the universe. Hell, now they are saying the Big Bang may be disproven. If that happens, I'm done with cosmology in general, lol...

originally posted by: LA1IMPALA
a reply to: blackmetalmist

I doubt it's ET they are probably past using electromagnetic waves to communicate. Its like us looking for people on earth that use smoke signals.

Suppose advanced extraterrestrials do have something better than radio for communications. If they wanted to communicate with us, they'd still need to use what we can receive, which is radio.

a reply to: Ross 54

Exactly. For all we know, they are way past using any of our discovered "waves" and know what we are capable of understanding very well, radio waves. Not to mention, they are a big part of our every day communication here on Earth. Who's to say we won't turn on the radio one day and we will hear them.

I hope we continue tuning in.

a reply to: JadeStar

I agree that, in the absence of contradicting evidence, a very broad banded signal is likely to be natural rather than the product of intelligence. There does seem to be some contrary evidence here, though.
We should recall that in our own technical evolution, as signals carried more and more information, they had to become broader and broader. An extraterrestrial civilization could have continued this process far beyond the point we have.

The absence of known astronomical sources of the signals and the fact that they do not lie in the general direction of the plane of our galaxy might suggest that they are associated with relatively nearby interstellar vessels or deep-space communications stations. If they are near, the indicated level of energy use could be much lower, and more believable.

a reply to: dr1234

Don't feel so important now I meant WE as in people who posted in a different thread.

originally posted by: blackmetalmist
a reply to: dr1234

Don't feel so important now

I meant WE as in people who posted in a different thread.

Omg...Your avatar... Want.

Are you a MAC artist?

a reply to: JadeStar

Thanks ! I wish I was! I'm a freelance MUA but don't work for MAC. Maybe one day.. having a full time job and kids is a handful

originally posted by: blackmetalmist
a reply to: JadeStar

Thanks ! I wish I was! I'm a freelance MUA but don't work for MAC.

That's so cooooool!!!!

Maybe one day.. having a full time job and kids is a handful

Awww, well bless. Keep your dream close to you, you never know, kids do grow up eventually.

a reply to: JadeStar

Thank you. Actually you kinda read my mind, I'm thinking of pursuing it once they get older. Btw, I love your quote "Girl with a Scope and a whole lotta hope".

Very empowering

originally posted by: blackmetalmist
a reply to: JadeStar

Thank you. Actually you kinda read my mind, I'm thinking of pursuing it once they get older. Btw, I love your quote "Girl with a Scope and a whole lotta hope".

Very empowering

Thanks.

originally posted by: Thebel
BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.

So far the only thing received in the "radio" spectrum has been from natural sources...i.e. Stars and other astronomical objects.

If ET were to use radio to transmit anything, it would be data, information, entertainment, just like Earth.

This sort of transmission does not work well in very short bursts, even at very high frequency, as there is not enough "time" to insert very much data. The signals that ET would send, IF he were to send them would look very much like the signals we send to satellites for the communication, telemetry, entertainment, etc. And that is never a short burst.

originally posted by: tanka418

originally posted by: Thebel
BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.

So far the only thing received in the "radio" spectrum has been from natural sources...i.e. Stars and other astronomical objects.

If ET were to use radio to transmit anything, it would be data, information, entertainment, just like Earth.

This sort of transmission does not work well in very short bursts, even at very high frequency, as there is not enough "time" to insert very much data. The signals that ET would send, IF he were to send them would look very much like the signals we send to satellites for the communication, telemetry, entertainment, etc. And that is never a short burst.

Um, actually we send short bursts all the time for things like radar mapping of planets or taking radar images of near Earth asteroids. We've used Earth's most powerful radio transmitter (Arecibo Planetary Radio) for just that purpose and those transmissions were/are powerful enough that if you were an alien on the other side of our Milky Way galaxy (65,000 light years away) and you had a dish the size of the 1000 meter Arecibo radio telescope with equipment no more sensitive than ours, you would be able to detect it in the frequency band 1-10 GHz.

In fact, the much more modest Allen Telescope Array which the SETI Institute operates in Northern California is sensitive enough to detect aliens using something like the Arecibo planetary radar as far away as 1,000 light years (a spherical area encompassing 14 million stars and an estimated 3,191,830 potentially habitable exoplanets).

So yeah, we produce powerful bursts which are transient in nature, contain almost no information and aliens could detect these many hundreds if not thousands of light years away.

However their non-information, burst-like nature is not why FRB's are unlikely to be produced by ET.

It is because show no characteristics we'd expect if they were coming from an ET civilization even doing asteroid scanning or planetary mapping.

From the paper: SETI Reloaded: Next Generation Radio Telescopes,
Transients and Cognitive Computing by M.A. Garrett.

4. SETI and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

Another very important and recent development in radio astronomy with profound relevance to SETI is the
progress being made in observing and understanding the transient nature of the radio sky. In particular, a new
class of transient radio sources have recently emerged known as FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts) [13]. Around about a
dozen of these events have now been detected, and they are characterised by their singularity, brightness (> 1
Jy), short duration (~ 1 millisecond) and very large dispersion measure (the latter being inferred via the frequency
dependent (ƒ-2) arrival time of the broadband radio burst [14]). The discovery of this entirely new class of radio
transient, clearly demonstrates the great strides being made in modern time-domain analysis of radio data.
Since the current generation of radio telescopes operating at cm wavelengths only have a very limited field-ofview,
the chances of detecting a FRB are actually rather low. By extrapolation [14], it is estimated that up to 10000
FRB events occur per day across the entire sky but almost all of them currently go unobserved. Since the location
of FRBs is only poorly determined by single dish positions, and since no follow-up detections have been made at
other wavelengths, the nature of these events is still a matter of considerable speculation. Although no Gamma
Ray Burst (GRB) events have yet been associated with FRBs, the most plausible explanations include supergiant
pulses from extragalactic Neutron Stars [15] or involve the collapse/merger of degenerate compact objects also
located at cosmological distances (e.g. [16]).

The consideration of whether these radio bursts might be artificial in nature seems not unreasonable – in
particular, the unusually high volumetric event rate is considered large for an extragalactic population [17]. The
short duration of FRB events suggests that the spatial scale associated with the phenomena is small, < 300km –
clearly the kind of physical scale that any advanced technical civilisation might deal comfortably with. On the other
hand, assuming the emission is largely isotropic, the energy release associated with an FRB event is considerable
~ 1031-33 Joules [14], up to several times greater than the total annual energy output of the Sun. Noting both the
implied energies, event rate and cosmological distances involved, any associated civilisation is required to be of at
least Kardashev Type 2. This begs the question why we don’t see other evidence for the presence of such
advanced civilisations elsewhere in the Universe, including in our own backyard.

Continued....

The energy requirements (and thus the inferred high brightness temperature of the emission) can be relaxed by
postulating some kind of beamed or coherent emission process. In the case of another technical civilisation being
involved, it is not inconceivable to suggest that the radio emission is produced via a coherent system of centrally
fed, transmitting antennas [18]. For example, a distributed array of transmitters with a maximum baseline of ~300
km, pointing directly towards the Earth and located ~ 1 Gpc away, requires a total power budget of ~1021 Watts
[18] (still considerable compared to our own capacity but several orders of magnitude less than that associated
with a Type 2 civilisation).

This energy budget can be significantly reduced by re-locating the transmitters to the
confines of our own Galaxy – in this case the apparently large dispersion measures (DM) might be explained if the
signal has been artificially (and negatively) chirped – a technique that is widely used in terrestrial radio
communication systems, in particular with radar and spread-spectrum applications. Alternatively, perhaps the high
DMs arise fairly close to the event itself e.g. via an external medium associated with the cold plasma waste
products of a technically advanced civilisation. Radio emission produced by interstellar propulsion systems would
not seem to fit the known characteristics of FRBs – proposed systems such as magnetic sails [19]) are not
expected to be used impulsively for example, and anti-matter engines detectable in the radio would probably be
even more easily detected at much higher frequencies (e.g. in the Gamma ray domain).

If FRBs are indeed some kind of directional ETI beacon or extra-galactic communication system, we would
expect bursts from these locations to eventually repeat. Assuming these events occur at cosmological distances
(and are therefore physically distinct and presumably operated by independent entities), some significant creativity
is required to explain why the characteristics of each FRB event should be so similar to one another. The
association of advanced civilisations with FRBs is currently highly speculative, and while the evidence does not in
my view completely rule out such a link, it is, in all probability, unlikely. The very similar physical characteristics of
FRBs detected so far, suggest that a common astrophysical explanation to this new and interesting class of
cosmic transient phenomena is a more natural solution.

So that's pretty much why they are probably not the result of ET.