[HN Gopher] Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, wi...
___________________________________________________________________
Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins
unknown
Author : rdamico
Score : 206 points
Date : 2020-06-27 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| magneticnorth wrote:
| Earth has had life for more maybe as long as 4 billion years, and
| in all that time there has been less than 200 years when a
| species had the intelligence, the motivation, and the
| technological advancement to send communications into space.
|
| I know the odds of this being life are (literally) astronomically
| low, but every time I hear news like this, I can't help hoping
| there's another species out there that found the will & the way
| to reach out.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Same feelings. It's never aliens, but it sure would be cool to
| meet a benevolent super advanced species or catch an
| intergalactic soap opera with octopus people. Really, any
| indication that we're not alone.
| bawana wrote:
| If aliens did exist, they would probably compress their
| communications. And they might use a fault tolerant
| infrastructure like TCP/IP. In either scenario, real
| communications would not be periodic but closer to random noise.
| Has anyone performed a Zipf plot or calculated shannon entropy of
| non-periodic radio signals?
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Not if they _wanted_ to specifically send out a beacon to other
| aliens.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Exactly. If you wanted to get someone's attention, you make
| your signal something that would standout from all of the
| background noise. If someone send a RCPT signal back, then
| you could consider sending a more complicated signal.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Why would an advanced intelligence advertise its location?
|
| It is a high-risk low-reward strategy.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangero
| u...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| What if they use error coding?
|
| My pet theory for a while has been that they use point-to-point
| communications (lasers), rather than wasteful omnidirectional
| radio waves, so that you have to get very lucky in order to
| eavesdrop on them.
| milquetoastaf wrote:
| This is a pretty big assumption? Humans use periodic beacons,
| too.
|
| In this case, I think it is most likely an astronomical object
| and not an artificial signal. Either way, it's interesting to
| see how we project ourselves on the extraterrestrial and the
| assumptions we make on aliens' behalf. There's a great book
| that came out last year, _Extraterrestrial Languages_ [0] that
| covers this phenomenon in-depth as well as the "universal"
| methods some researchers devised in creating languages for
| transmissions. (it gets very technical! Highly rec'd for PL
| nerds)
|
| 0 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/extraterrestrial-languages
| cat199 wrote:
| > closer to random noise
|
| in the data stream, sure, but the underlying data framing would
| probably still have very strong patterns as compared to true
| noise
| Supermancho wrote:
| TCP over radio? Direct communication by is the simplest
| implementation. Encoding a signal further seems counter
| intuitive, as opposed to a short repeating beacon that serves
| initial groundwork for a handshake. If the signal is supposed
| to cross vast interruptible distance, the bodies interrupting a
| continuous straightforward signal would appear periodic to the
| receiver.
| jcims wrote:
| Does it sound like this?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkbekhUdw4
|
| Yes, you know what it is. :D
| tartoran wrote:
| If it's regular like clockwork it's nothing but a cog in the
| universe we're looking at, all in all interesting to study. Next
| irregular signal will be even more interesting though that does
| not necessarily imply alien communication
| aquova wrote:
| My first thought was that this sounds like a pulsar, and I was
| surprised to not see that among the list of possible phenomenon.
| After looking it up, I still wasn't quite sure why these couldn't
| be pulsars. Is it because the period is much higher than typical
| pulsars?
| teraflop wrote:
| The article suggests it could be a spinning neutron star, which
| is what a pulsar is. But a pulsar produces an extremely regular
| sequence of pulses. (Well, actually it emits a continuous beam
| of radio waves, but its rotation causes the beam to point
| towards any given observer at regular intervals.)
|
| This article describes a source that seems to start and stop at
| regular intervals of several days (much longer than any known
| pulsar's rotational period) but within the active intervals,
| the bursts appear to be random. That suggests a more complex
| mechanism is at work.
| rootbear wrote:
| I just throw some gasoline on the "It must be Aliens!" theory
| (to which I do not subscribe!) and point out that heavily
| compressed data looks random...
| menybuvico wrote:
| As does encrypted data.
| beamatronic wrote:
| That's why somebody needs to send out a sequence of prime
| numbers
| lumost wrote:
| What protocol do you use to represent the sequence?
| Bytes, Morse, Amplitude modulation, frequency modulation?
| All of these combinations may appear random to one
| without the right codec.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| 1 is 1 blip, 2 is 2 blips, etc. just like in the movie
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system
| beamatronic wrote:
| I wonder if this could be accomplished with a train of
| satellites. All in the same orbit. Just spaced out like
| this:
|
| xx xxx xxxxx xxxxxxx
|
| So they just go around and around, including the light,
| from the point of view of a far away perspective
| cgriswald wrote:
| You would need to set up the satellites in such a way
| that anyone receiving your message is viewing their
| orbits edge on. Your satellites would also have to be
| extremely large and fairly close to your host star. And
| there'd have to be no dust between your star and the
| receiver.
|
| As a method to communicate with people you don't know
| exist, it's not very good because chances are they won't
| be viewing your satellites edge on. For people you know
| are there, it's needlessly complicated and expensive.
|
| If you're going to go to the trouble, you'd be better off
| making a Dyson swarm and cloaking your star completely.
| You'd get energy back and be just as detectable for a
| civilization that thought to compare visible and IR
| sources (which some Earth scientists have done, with
| negative results).
| elwell wrote:
| Compression is just a bad encryption algorithm.
| Encryption is just a bad compression algorithm.
| nabla9 wrote:
| One explanation might be a pulsar circling something.
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| Pulsars aren't 100% ruled out, but I think they're considered
| reasonably unlikely. The problem is mostly the apparent
| brightness. If you place almost any known pulsar (which are all
| in our galaxy) at the in the host galaxy of a localised FRB
| which(only a fraction of FRB's do we have measured distances
| for, but they're all quite far away), if would be far too dim.
|
| The only exception to this is the Crab pulsar, which is
| observed to occasionally have "giant pulses" which are 1000s of
| times brighter than a typical pulse. If you put the a somewhat
| brighter version of the Crab pulsar in an FRB host galaxy at
| the low end of the known distances, you might just about be
| able to see it.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> This new FRB source, which the team has catalogued as FRB
| 180916.J0158+65, is the first to produce a periodic, or cyclical
| pattern of fast radio bursts. The pattern begins with a noisy,
| four-day window, during which the source emits random bursts of
| radio waves, followed by a 12-day period of radio silence. The
| astronomers observed that this 16-day pattern of fast radio
| bursts reoccurred consistently over 500 days of observations._
|
| I wonder how these aliens manage to work only for 4 days and then
| rest for almost 2 whole weeks. They must be quite advanced.
| undersuit wrote:
| Well the aliens producing the Soap being broadcast probably
| work during the whole 2 weeks before they release the newest
| episode.
| admiralspoo wrote:
| What a garbage press release for 6 month old news. MIT's
| reputation continues to decline.
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| To be slightly fair, the policies of the journals have a lot to
| do with this. I'll try and explain:
|
| This paper was submitted to Nature as it would be fairly high
| profile, and Nature does now allow you to put in on the arXiv
| at submission, which was done in January. Since then it has
| been going through peer review, and being queued up to get
| published in the journal which finally happened on June 17th.
| However, during that whole time there is a press embargo. So
| although you may have seen it back in January, that was because
| a few outlets picked it up by scanning the arXiv themselves,
| and no one within the collaboration has been allowed to talk
| about it to the press, and no universities to publicise it in
| the intervening time. That embargo has presumably just been
| lifted which is why this is all coming out now.
|
| Because of the embargo you wouldn't have seen quotes and
| comments from people involved in the initial coverage back in
| January, and even if I'd noticed it getting posted to HN back
| in January I would have not been allowed to comment on it like
| I'm doing now.
| modzu wrote:
| FRBs seem to make the front page of hn on a repeating cycle too
| lol
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Another day, another periodic pulse detected
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| One of paper authors here. I'll try and answer some of the
| questions in the comments.
|
| It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the
| arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.
| networkimprov wrote:
| When are you scheduled for an appearance on the Event Horizon
| podcast?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| Actually looks like Shriharsh, one of the folks in the
| collaboration has already done it!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc8FsImLUEU
|
| I guess he probably didn't talk about this because of the
| press embargo though.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Am I the only one that needs an RSS feed to follow a
| podcast channel? Maybe I'm using the wrong app?
| mturmon wrote:
| Could you say something about how you are now, or might later,
| coordinate fast follow up observations in other wavelengths or
| with other instruments?
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| This is a good question. FRBs pose a lot of challenges for
| follow up because most of them are not observed to repeat
| (this doesn't mean they don't repeat, just that they haven't
| been seen to). So you see them for a few seconds and then
| they're gone. To follow up, you need to know where exactly to
| look, and most of the instruments like CHIME used to discover
| FRBs don't have the resolution to see exactly where on the
| sky it was. You can maybe pin point it to within 1/4 degree,
| but need more like 1000th degree resolution to meaningfully
| follow up in other wavebands.
|
| The most useful follow up has been for repeating FRBs. What
| happens there is that the discovery telescope tells you were
| it is roughly, and you know it repeats, so you can point a
| high resolution radio telescope (something like
| https://www.evlbi.org) to get a more precise location and
| then you can follow up with other telescopes.
|
| One thing telescopes like CHIME are trying to do in the near
| future is to build their own long baseline station to give
| much higher resolution, such that they can get localisation
| on bursts which don't repeat, and do better follow up.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Assuming that it is aliens, for a moment, we can not know if
| these aliens are friendly or hostile, right? So, given that
| there is a 50/50 chance of them being hostile, and given their
| awesome show of strength, the precautionary principal dictates
| that we not advertise our presence too loudly.
| pvaldes wrote:
| 33 % chance of being hostile, 33% of being friendly and 33%
| of do not wanting anything with us in decades by cause of an
| humongous jet-lag
| magicMonkeyPaw wrote:
| are you looking forward to reading all the crazy people's takes
| on why it's actually aliens that you found?
| reedwolf wrote:
| I haven't seen the original paper (maybe that should've been
| linked instead?), but the MIT press release is dripping with
| "Not it's saying aliens..." innuendo.
|
| It's kind of hypocritical to use nod-wink-aliens-clickbait to
| drum up media attention, then ridicule the first rube who
| asks if aliens could possibly be involved.
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| That's a fair comment. I mostly think the MIT press release
| is pretty good and doesn't go down that route, _except_ for
| the title, which is definitely hinting at it.
|
| Also agree that it would make sense to replace the link
| with the actual paper, or an article about it. University
| press releases are mostly there to play up their own
| contribution.
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| Always!
|
| I think astronomers often make it worse. I mean, we like
| thinking about why things are actually aliens as much as
| anyone else (LGM1 was already mentioned), and while we mostly
| try to restrain ourselves, every now and again a famous
| astronomer breaks and lets out a paper about it.
| plutonorm wrote:
| That's great to hear! If some credible evidence of aliens
| did appear, where do you think it would come from? Tabby's
| Star like data? atmospheric spectra? FRB's? other? Would
| absolutely love to hear your thoughts :)
| antepodius wrote:
| My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning
| us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.
| api wrote:
| That already happened. Living cells are nanotechnology.
| Something loaded with them impacted billions of years
| ago, and we're currently working on AI and rockets.
| techbio wrote:
| Source, please.
| api wrote:
| It was intended as a joke, like the parent.
| perl4ever wrote:
| I think there was a HN thread not that long ago about
| speculation that (at least some) viruses come to earth
| from space, so perhaps it is happening all the time.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Earth is perfectly capable to do it at home. Has created
| things more bizarre than viruses.
| tlow wrote:
| Can you say more about these nanotech slugs please?
| 0ld wrote:
| I believe they are referencing James S. A. Corey The
| Expanse [0] series
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
| antepodius wrote:
| Haha, nah, it was more the general idea. An amalgam of
| sci-fi. Greg Egan had a story where an advanced civ sends
| a gram-sized slug into the gas giant of a solar system,
| which bootstraps to machinery that 3d prints people and
| machinery, which is a plausible enough inspiration that I
| can give it here. Just remove the implausible 'nobody
| just decides to go bacteria-mode' aspect from Egan's far-
| future stories.
| antepodius wrote:
| Imagine you're arbitrarily close to the physical limits
| of technology. You do or could understand how living
| things work, down to the molecular level, for example,
| and know how to engineer self-replicating machinery
| analogous to DNA. At the very least, you could build a
| 'spaceship' that can grow something at least as efficient
| as people, who can replicate however and disassemble
| earth for raw materials. Presumably, you can do much
| better, and you end up with something like a self-
| packaged deployable technological superintelligent
| ecosystem.
| gota wrote:
| This seems a reasonable and straightforward scenario and
| I'll prepare accordingly
| antepodius wrote:
| Make yourself intra-universally interesting enough that
| the alien construction management AI might instantiate a
| simulation of you from the cached info at some point.
| It's a strange sort of Darwinism, but it's all we've got.
| pso wrote:
| Pure speculation, isn't the most interesting time period in the
| signal the transition from signal to no-signal (and back
| again)? How high is the resolution of the sensors? Is it
| possible that some frequencies are blocked fractionally earlier
| than others? At a fine enough temporal resolution, there might
| be more clues regarding the source.
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| Good question. For many FRBs there is access to the original
| antenna time streams (which are essentially voltages samples
| at 800 MHz), so superficially that might give you 1.25ns
| resolution. However, the intrinsic width of the pulses seem
| to be more like ~1ms. That tells you something about the
| emission source, giving you a rough upper bound on it's size
| of c * 1ms ~ 300km.
|
| However, lots of interesting plasma physics effect occur
| between us and the FRB. The dominant thing that happens is
| that low frequencies arrive later than high frequencies (as
| they travel slow in a plasma). This causes the FRB to be
| smeared over many seconds rather than a millisecond. There's
| also multi path interference effects and an whole bunch of
| other stuff that happens. So actual the temporal structure of
| the burst tells you much more about the intervening medium
| than it does about the source.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I think of multipath being about signals bouncing off other
| objects (reflection) and bending through media (refraction)
| before reaching the receiver. At the cosmic scale, I'm
| guessing multipath also involves gravitational lensing.
| Correct?
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| There is some possibility of gravitational lensing of
| FRBs and people are definitely searching for it. However,
| in this case it is refraction caused by variation in the
| density of the ionised gas between us and the source
| (within our galaxy, the host galaxy, and at lower
| densities in the intervening medium).
| [deleted]
| sradman wrote:
| Have any additional FRBs been detected since the publication of
| the paper?
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| Many.
|
| I'm not super involved on the FRB side of CHIME, so I'm not
| 100% clear what is public and what isn't. But you can an idea
| from public info around the internet. I think the last total
| number made public was over 700 in March this year, and the
| previous one 30 in October 2018
| (https://aasnova.org/2020/03/13/chime-detects-even-more-
| repea...).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Is it fair to say that leading hypotheses for this kinds of
| events include an orbiting body, leading to the periodicity?
| ellis0n wrote:
| The more powerful technology provides the more powerful chips
| and telescopes and microscopes. On the basis of new data
| obtained with the help of new devices, new theories are created
| that help in creating even more microscopic components, which
| will help in creating even more powerful devices recursively.
| The singularity in the action of CHIME and AI made it possible
| to determine the signal; a major breakthrough is coming in all
| areas. Interestingly, somewhere there is a miscalculation when
| we can look into the space using a smartphone in real time? Any
| related theorems?
| mef51 wrote:
| The data for this discovery as well as other work from CHIME/FRB
| is available here: https://chime-frb-open-data.github.io/
| DrBazza wrote:
| If it's periodic, it's something orbiting something.
|
| If it's powerful enough to be seen 500 million ly away, one of
| the two orbiting objects is going to be a black hole.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Or one thing rotating.
|
| You can imagine other cyclical processes, but I don't know any
| are realistic.
| DFHippie wrote:
| The thing to explain then, in either the precession or the
| orbiting case, is the variability in the period.
| pas wrote:
| Variable stars, something involving a cyclic phase transition
| (from silent to active and back). Something like the Type Ia
| supernova, where the dense white dwarf siphons off mass from
| its companion until it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit and
| bang.
| jrichardshaw wrote:
| There's a few ways to do it (and the press release is
| surprisingly good and mentions most of them), but certainly one
| of the more obvious explanations is that the emitting object,
| is in a binary system with some other object, and that
| modulates the emission mechanism somehow.
|
| I don't think either needs to be a black hole though. What I
| consider the most plausible candidate for emission is probably
| magnetars (i.e. neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic
| fields), and there's no reason the companion would need to be a
| black hole either, you just need a companion that gives a 16
| day orbit and that's very easy to do with another star or
| neutron star.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| This galactic magnetar
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR_1806%E2%88%9220) affected
| the Earth's atmosphere.
|
| Just how luminous can an extra-galactic one be? Is the FRB an
| axial emission?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Maybe, but perhaps not in the way you think. A source that
| emits radiation only at certain angles (think a stellar disco
| ball) would only "flash" us infrequently as we moved relative
| to it.
| cosmic_ape wrote:
| Isn't it strange that the periods mentioned are integer multiples
| of _days_?
|
| Don't known much about astronomy, but day as a unit of time is
| just a constant specific to our particular solar system. I guess
| a function of the sizes of the sun and the planets here. There
| should be nothing special about it. To think that 500M light
| years away there is something that has similar time proportions
| to be observed here as periodic is amazing by itself.
| qayxc wrote:
| The period is 16.35 +/-0.18 days [1] so it's not exactly 16
| days. The unit days is just the next best convenient unit to
| use for this range of time scale. 392 hours +/- 4 hours just
| isn't as intuitive as 16 days.
|
| So the period is neither an integer multiple of days, nor
| exactly the same each time. There's some small variance
| involved - about 1%.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRB_180916.J0158%2B65
| perlgeek wrote:
| Since it hasn't come up yet: whenever a new astronomical
| phenomenon is detected, people think "Aliens!" as the reason.
|
| In fact, when the first pulsar was discovered, it was (somewhat
| jokingly) called LGM-1 for "little green men".
|
| I'm sure the news hype cycle will come up with similar ideas this
| time, and I'm just as sure that we'll find a perfectly reasonable
| explanation not involving intelligent, extraterrestrial life
| forms.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Until one day when it becomes true ..
| zoomablemind wrote:
| We should beam back our commercials at them... they may just
| change their mind and switch to ads-free alternative.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Oh no,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
| Jestar342 wrote:
| Some of the earliest radio broadcasts are Hitler's
| speeches, as well as other world leaders preparing their
| nations for global conflict. So there's that.
| perl4ever wrote:
| There's a story in which aliens unexpectedly destroy
| nearly everything in the solar system and when asked why,
| they explain that they received transmissions of Star
| Trek episodes and people singing "We Are The World" and
| so they put together the fantasies of galactic domination
| with the idea that humans might be close to global
| unification, and decided it was time to apply a bug bomb
| to Earth.
|
| In other words, the things we see as negative might not
| bother aliens much, if they mostly indicate we might
| destroy ourselves.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| That would be TV broadcasts as I'm guessing everyone here
| seen Contact.
|
| Ironically in 1948 when FM was standardized and countries
| were assigned spectrums Germany wasn't really invited as
| it wasn't a state for that short period and wasn't
| assigned a spectrum so they started broadcasting in VHF
| because that wasn't covered by the Copenhagen Agreement.
|
| A few years later people realized that VHF was supper
| efficient for FM unlike AM and (W)Germany ended up
| holding all the cards.
|
| This is why (primarily older) VHF FM radio compatible
| receivers in Europe will have UKW FM or UKW option in the
| turner which stands for Ultrakurzwelle (Ultra short wave)
| that was before UHF was standardized above the VHF
| spectrum.
| huntermeyer wrote:
| This is why I come to HN! Thanks for sharing this.
| PoachedSausage wrote:
| You may be interested in a history of Philips TV Tuners:
|
| https://www.maximus-randd.com/tv-tuner-history-pt1.html
| egfx wrote:
| > I'm guessing everyone here seen Contact.
|
| More than once
| JJMcJ wrote:
| "Earth Peoples, we come for the secret of the ShamWow"
| biesnecker wrote:
| We have searched the galaxy and discovered that it indeed
| cannot be found in stores.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| There was a time when people thought a ball of fire moving
| across the sky every day must be alive. The universe is full of
| strange phenomena perfectly explainable by physics. This is no
| different.
| hnarn wrote:
| Are you saying that extraterrestrial intelligence is not "a
| strange phenomena perfectly explainable by physics"?
| antepodius wrote:
| The map is not the territory; the way people stumble
| through their maps has little to do with the territory.
|
| People's intuitive maps don't tend to distinguish greatly
| between the plausibility of sapient suns and the
| plausibility of sapient aliens.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Of course life at a deep level is just physics. But given
| that the information content of this signal is relatively
| low (regular patterns of repeats) and that the amount of
| energy it requires is immense, I'd bet much more heavily on
| a natural phenomenon than life-directed activity.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| It's just calling it by a different name though. Nothing of
| the magic has been altered.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Eventually physicists are going to end up trying to explain
| signs of intelligent life as new Physics and calibrate their
| models according to it.
|
| "Greetings from ___." "Oh, hello... uhh, so those signals
| were your house and not a trefoil of two black holes and a
| quasar?
| libraryatnight wrote:
| This is what I was just thinking. I personally hope if it
| does happen the reveal has excellent comedic timing.
| rhacker wrote:
| It's really not "perfectly" explainable by physics since we
| don't understand all aspects of physics yet. If you said
| "mostly" explainable by physics I would believe you.
|
| Also, if an alien happens to be shining a beam at us
| rhythmically, that's also "explained" by physics but we won't
| actually know if the source is a natural phenomena or an
| alien shining his super flashlight at us.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| No, that was the right phrasing. It isn't perfectly
| _explained_ , but its perfectly explainable.
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| It is not perfectly explainable _by us_ , though.
|
| And it may not actually perfectly explainable _ever_.
| Nothing guarantees we can get a perfect understanding of
| physics.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Since it hasn 't come up yet: whenever a new astronomical
| phenomenon is detected, people think "Aliens!" as the reason._
|
| Same thing with UFOs, despite the fact that there's been
| decades of R&D into weaponizing and developing novel UAVs.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Shouldn't they be able to discriminate the type of object (single
| star with orbiting planets that obstruct radio waves, or dual
| star plus planets where the emitter itself also moves around an
| orbit) by analyzing the received carrier frequency and see if
| it's also modulated by a much lower frequency (Doppler effect)
| compatible with orbital motion?
| teraflop wrote:
| FRBs don't really have a "carrier frequency" in that sense. The
| radio burst occurs a broad range of frequencies, which can vary
| substantially from one burst to the next (there are graphs of
| this in the paper linked above). But there's no sharp peak that
| can be accurately measured, as far as I know.
|
| And even if there was, we don't understand the mechanism behind
| FRBs, so we wouldn't necessarily be able to distinguish a
| Doppler shift from some other effect that caused the frequency
| to change.
| JackFr wrote:
| > For the most part, these detections were one-offs, flashing
| briefly before disappearing entirely.
|
| I realize there is most likely an explanation that doesn't
| require intelligent alien life, but that screams Dark Forest
| Theory.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| We should broadcast the coordinates of a distant star to see
| what happens.
| vmladenov wrote:
| There are a lot of cool concepts in those books, but the
| sophon faster-than-light communication that props up a lot of
| the story was a bit too much for me.
| swiley wrote:
| Which space do you build the coordinates from? How will you
| encode them?
| hnarn wrote:
| 1) The one relative to the receiver of the coordinates
|
| 2) You start by explaining the encoding first, before
| sending coordinates, maybe by establishing X and Y axes as
| well as compass direction based on "landmarks" that should
| be visible from the receiver.
|
| That's the first thing that came to my mind at least.
| beamatronic wrote:
| It seems to me there's no limit to what we can learn by observing
| outer space.
| sradman wrote:
| arxiv Jan 28 paper "Periodic activity from a fast radio burst
| source" [1] via Feb 7 Vice article [2] and Wikipedia "Canadian
| Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)" page [3].
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10275
|
| [2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-
| deep-...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Hydrogen_Intensity_Ma...
| zargath wrote:
| Probably just some aliens from some advanced civilization Far far
| away.
| bcardarella wrote:
| And presumably all gone by now
| savrajsingh wrote:
| They didn't mention a simpler solution: random emitter orbits
| behind something / Is occluded for the silent period?
| teraflop wrote:
| I'm having a hard time imagining what kind of geometry would
| cause an orbiting object to be occluded for more than 50% of
| its orbital period.
| krapp wrote:
| Obviously the weird, non-euclidean geometry of some vast and
| incomprehensible machine built by eldritch abominations. When
| the stars have properly aligned, we will understand its true
| purpose all to well.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Get Jodie Foster in here.
| b34r wrote:
| "It's like clockwork". Probably a natural source then
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