Scientists assume they’ve solved ‘alien’ sign thriller behind millisecond-long pulses
Scientist believe they have uncovered the mystery behind ‘alien’ energy waves – the physicist who discovered them initially thought they originated from an alien civilisation
Scientists have finally solved the strange mystery of radio signals coming from space. Some theoretical physicists had suggested they could originate from alien civilisations.
The radio bursts are millisecond-long pulses of radio waves and have to travel across billions of lightyears and be picked up on Earth. These Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) were first discovered in 2007 by Theoretical Physicist, Professor Avi Loeb, from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, have now pinpointed the origin of one of these radio bursts. The origins of one FRB was found to be suspiciously close to a neutron star. Neutron stars are incredibly dense collapsed stars that are the size of a city, despite having the mass of a star.
Dr Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor at MIT, said: “Around these highly magnetic neutron stars also known as magnetars, atoms can’t exist – they would just get torn apart by magnetic fields.
“The exciting thing here is, we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, is twisting and reconfiguring such that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across our universe.”
Professor Loeb, who discovered the energy burst, had previously claimed that they could be a “powerful radio beam” created by alien civilisations and used for military purposes. However other scientists believe the burst of energy had more natural origins.
The researchers were able to pinpoint the origin of a 2022 FRB by analysing the ray’s “scintillation”, a phenomenon similar to how stars twinkle in the night sky.
It hinges on the idea that further away an object is the more it will twinkle. Radio waves pass through an interstellar medium and as they do they scintillate, allowing scientists to grasp where the wave originated from.
The research team estimated that the burst exploded from an area very close to a rotating neutron star – 6000 miles away, less than the distance between London and Chicago. This short distance puts the origin of the burst within the star’s magnetic field and is the first conclusive evidence that FRB can originate from a magnetosphere.
