New Radio Signal From Space, possible new WOW signal.

originally posted by: wildespace
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.

I would think this to be quite accurate an assessment. Though for there to be so many signals over a short space of time, I would think it would be something reasonably commonplace... we just haven't been listening for it until now.

Korg.

From the information that has been given it is extremely unlikely that this would be an alien signal, or a signal from any form of intelligence. It is most likely a natural phenomenon. Radio telescopes are more powerful than optical telescopes, but even radio telescopes are limited. We can only gather and analyze a very small portion of what is going on "out there," so it stands to reason that as we become more and more technologically advanced we will discover new phenomena. Our entire picture of the universe is incomplete. We have theories that work incredibly well in many instances, while in other instances we have just scratched the surface.

a reply to: JadeStar

Fair point - I shall have a read, thanks

Not that I wasn't up to date for "basic astronomy" but rather just the fact it's hard to be certain about something founded on our extremely limited knowledge about planetary formation based solely on our own Solar System.

Up until very recently (the last decade and a half or so), Scientists weren't even sure if planets were that common and they've found systems out there that are quite different to our own (Gas giants tidally locked to their host star for example)

a reply to: JadeStar

Interestingly, that second link you posted for "Sun like Stars" and measuring their age, many of the Stars they observed were younger than our own, meaning that any alien life there might be younger or the same age, but then this depends on whether life evolved at the same stage and didn't have the same problems our planet had (for example, the meteor killing off the dinosaurs - had it not, there might have been an intelligent race of Theropods evolve 60 million years earlier than Humans did)

a reply to: buster2010

Bless, you have no idea of scale do you.

JadeStar is right-the most likely source is a natural one.

It's only a blip-but it's a very powerful blip, one that could only be made by a power so great that no being could ever hope to recreate it. It could be the birth of a supermassive black hole;there are few suspects when it comes to ginormous stellar explosions.

originally posted by: SpongeBeard

originally posted by: stumason
a reply to: strongfp

Radio waves can hold extremely large amounts of information, it's all in the encoding and the frequency you use.

Communications over long distances (interstellar or in this case intergalactic) would probably benefit greatly from being very high bandwidth with very short duration

Really? There are all sorts of astrophysical dispersion problems at different frequencies. A high bandwidth means many different frequencies transmitted, some of which would induce very different physical processes in the medium.

If you want to communicate over long distances you have to design the carrier with respect to the best possible transmission frequencies, and use lots of redundancy and channel coding.

And realistically engineered transmissions would probably below the noise threshold naively and would need extensive CDMA type of signal processing/correlation analysis/averaging/whatever to get them above threshold.

If you engineer a physical transmission system, the maximum power emitted has a huge effect on your cost, because you have to deal with dissipation/heat etc at that level. Much cheaper to design a 100 watt amplifier and transmit it steadily for long periods of time than to have a terawatt amplifier for a microsecond.

originally posted by: ManFromEurope
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?

Something like that is a civilization extinguishing event.

Maybe it's not message, but ET war: they've upset the metastable QFT vacuum in some location and vaporized the enemy homeworld. Or themselves, if they were looking for "free energy". (No I don't think either is likely)

Post just to read through later

They tell us it quasars.
but really? they dont know.
and you fall for it!

Perhaps we are getting signals from (Kepler-186f)...io9.com...

a reply to: buddha

I understand your point. It reminds me of a quote by someone that I cannot recall, but it was something like "The more that you think that you know, the more that you know that you do not know", and I believe that we human beings have entered a stage that reflects this.

Now of course we have advanced very far, and the skeptical and cautious approach by the scientific community is to be expected, because they base everything on results. Some of the time reckless theory comes into their equations, but for the most part usually everything that they put their names on is backed up by the facts, and we should thank them all for that. In a World full of distortion and chaos, the truth is what matters now more than ever.

The unknown though, oh the great unknown! Can we primitive beings even fathom what that means, and what possibly could be out there sending these signals throughout our vast Universe? With that being said, I myself personally believe that having an open mind is just as much of a powerful tool as Scientific theory. ~$heopleNation

a reply to: mbkennel

Could be a heads up to let us all know that they are finally coming back once again to see just how bad their little pets have messed up again this time around. Just saying that it could be, but maybe not. ~$heopleNation

what frequency ?

I wonder if that signal is traveling by "slingshoting" around other targeted stars, bouncing back its way among different stars in order to reach our destination: Sol.

They should study the effects of gravity on the pathway of the signal.

a reply to: charles911

GHz range

There is one interesting idea. It could be neutron stars collapsing fast enough that no x/gamma radiation can escape. The star "disappears" almost instantaneously. This results in a disruption of its magnetic field (source of the field suddenly gone) producing strong magnetic shock waves seen as radio bursts.
arxiv.org...

originally posted by: caladonea
Perhaps we are getting signals from (Kepler-186f)...io9.com...

No. Because they aren't coming from that direction and they are natural wideband noise. Nothing artificial about them.

originally posted by: stumason
a reply to: JadeStar

Interestingly, that second link you posted for "Sun like Stars" and measuring their age, many of the Stars they observed were younger than our own, meaning that any alien life there might be younger or the same age, but then this depends on whether life evolved at the same stage and didn't have the same problems our planet had (for example, the meteor killing off the dinosaurs - had it not, there might have been an intelligent race of Theropods evolve 60 million years earlier than Humans did)

Good points. Here's another link for you

arxiv.org...

Earths have been produced since about 2.4 billion years after the big bang and our Earth was built 4.6 billion years
ago, 8.8 billion years after the big bang (Lineweaver 1999). The dark grey area to the left of 8.8 billion years is a measure of the number of earth-like planets older than ours, about 74 ± 9% are older. We live on a young planet.

The first earth-like planets were formed about 11 billion years ago so the oldest are about 6.4 billion years older than our
Earth. The age of the average earth in the Universe is 6.4 ± 0.9 billion years, that is, it formed about 7 billion years after the big bang. Thus, the average earth in the Universe is 1.8 ± 0.9 billion years older than our Earth. And, if life exists on some of these earths, it will have evolved, on average, 1.8 billion years longer than we have on Earth.

For comparison, the thin line is the star formation rate normalized to the earth production rate today. The time delay between the onset of star formation and the onset of earth production is the ∼ 1.5 billion years that it took for metals to accumulate sufficiently to form earths.

So yes, most Earthlike planets in our Milky Way galaxy are older than Earth. Around 75% in fact.

It's a lure.

Don't answer it.