![]() ![]() ![]() "When Jocelyn Bell first spotted pulsars in their radio data, the team called the signal LGM-1, for Little Green Man… and I think they were only half-joking," said Bothwell, referring to the astrophysicist who first discovered radio pulsar stars. "By analyzing the intensity of bursts from other stars, we can work out whether any planets they host are suitable for life," he said.Īnd although aliens would be an exciting possibility, detecting a new kind of cosmic phenomena would be a close second. Wang's research focuses on radio signals from astronomical objects, and one possible explanation is a burst from a very faint star. While disappointing for alien fans, even radio signals with natural sources can help scientists in their search for alien life. But ASKAP J173608.2−321635 seems to have sent out a radio wave burp, and nothing else. If this thing was any known object, it would have emitted lots of other radiation like high energy X-rays at the same time. He told Newsweek: "The problem is that didn't emit any other type of signal, apart from this radio burst. One of the reasons why is that the source of the signal didn't emit anything else, said Matt Bothwell, public astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. "The main evidence for this is that they are 'broadband,' spanning the entire frequency spectrum."īut it's still mysterious. "The signals we have detected are almost certainly astrophysical, meaning they are from a star or other astronomical object, not from another civilisation," Ziteng Wang, one of the paper's authors from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, told Newsweek. It's easy for the imagination to stray to the possibility of an intelligent source-a distant alien civilization beaming out their existence to other aliens like us who happened to be looking in the right place at the right time. However, the study adds, "none of these fully explains the observations." According to the study, possible sources of the signal include a dim low-mass star or something extremely energetic, like a pulsar or a magnetar. ![]() It also repeated itself, and was detected six times between January and September 2020.Ī follow-up search with the MeerKAT telescope found the signal once again in February 2021, when it briefly flashed before fading away again. The source of the signal was close to the middle of the galaxy, around four degrees from the galactic center. What To Know About James Webb Telescope As Launch Date Set.Mysterious Smoke Detected on International Space Station.Gangs of Mining Robots Could Do the Dirty Work for Astronauts on the Moon. ![]()
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