Mysterious outburst of deep-space light flashes baffles scientists

[editor]

Interesting stuff!

Last year's mysterious outburst of deep-space light flashes was even more frenzied than previously thought, a new study reports.

On Aug. 26, 2017, astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen project — a $100 million effort to hunt for signs of intelligent alien life — spotted 21 repeating light pulses called fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from the dwarf galaxy FRB 121102 within the span of 1 hour.

Some scientists think FRBs come from fast-rotating neutron stars, but their source has not been nailed down. And that explains Breakthrough Listen's interest: It's possible that the bursts are produced by intelligent extraterrestrials, perhaps to blast space-sailing craft through the cosmos at incredible speeds, some folks have speculated. (Breakthrough Listen's sister project, Breakthrough Starshot, is developing a laser-based light-sailing system that aims to launch tiny probes toward alien solar systems in the next 30 years.)

And FRB 121102, which lies about 3 billion light-years from Earth, is particularly intriguing: It's the only known "repeater" source of FRBs, which otherwise tend to be one-offs.

In the new study, Breakthrough Listen team members based at the University of California, Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center applied machine-learning techniques to the August 2017 data set, which was acquired by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and was originally analyzed using traditional methods.

The researchers, led by UC Berkeley doctoral student Gerry Zhang, trained an algorithm called a "convolutional neural network" to spot FRBs among the 400 terabytes of data. The strategy is similar to that employed by IT companies to optimize internet search results, Breakthrough Listen representatives said in a statement.

Zhang and his colleagues dug up an additional 72 light flashes, bringing the total number of FRBs detected on that day, from that single source (whatever it may be), to 93.

Mysterious Light Flashes Are Coming from Deep Space, and AI Just Found More of Them

 

[weltweit]

Interesting

 

[SpookyFrank]

Maybe we should have a 'things that might be aliens' thread. There's also this:

The Mysterious Star KIC 8462852 | SETI Institute

The SETI Institute is following up on the possibility that the stellar system KIC 8462852 might be home to an advanced civilization.

This star, slightly brighter than the Sun and more than 1400 light-years away, has been the subject of scrutiny by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. It has shown some surprising behavior that’s odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena. KIC 8462852 occasionally dims by as much as 20 percent, suggesting that there is some material in orbit around this star that blocks its light.

For various reasons, it’s obvious that this material is not simply a planet. A favored suggestion is that it is debris from comets that have been drawn into relatively close orbit to the star.

But another, and obviously intriguing, possibility is that this star is home to a technologically sophisticated society that has constructed a phalanx of orbiting solar panels (a so-called Dyson swarm) that block light from the star.

 

[Signal 11]

Maybe we should have a 'things that might be aliens' thread. There's also this:

The Mysterious Star KIC 8462852 | SETI Institute

Have astronomers detected an alien megastructure'?

Spoiler

No.

 

[skyscraper101]

Al who?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Have astronomers detected an alien megastructure'?

Spoiler

No.

You're the dude at the beginning of the movie who everyone hates because he's all like 'I'm not going to give this plucky underdog hero 100 billion dollars and all the nuclear launch codes just because he thinks aliens are coming' and then the audience is all like 'yeah fuck you' when the big explosions start at the end of act one and you're the first named character to get vapourised.

 

[cheesethief]

It's not aliens.

I mean, it might be, in much the same way as the now banned lottery slogan "It could be you".

Probability of it being an as yet unexplained natural phenomena: 99.999999999%
Probability of it being the work of intelligent aliens: 0.000000001%

Or thereabouts....

 

[existentialist]

It's not aliens.

I mean, it might be, in much the same way as the now banned lottery slogan "It could be you".

Probability of it being an as yet unexplained natural phenomena: 99.999999999%
Probability of it being the work of intelligent aliens: 0.000000001%

Or thereabouts....

*goes and plugs those numbers into the Drake equation *

 

[cheesethief]

*goes and plugs those numbers into the Drake equation *

Make your own numbers up!

That's what Drake did after all...

 

[farmerbarleymow]

Probability of it being an as yet unexplained natural phenomena: 99.999999999%
Probability of it being the work of intelligent aliens: 0.000000001%

Definitely aliens then.

 

[NoXion]

Make your own numbers up!

That's what Drake did after all...

No. Drake may have formulated the equation, but as far as I know he didn't specify what numbers should be filled in for each variable.

I don't know why people shit on the Drake equation for not having all the answers, when it was never intended to. Drake wasn't an idiot, he knew that some of the variables weren't known at the time he formulated them. I think people dismiss the equation because they plug optimistic numbers into it, and then when the ensuing results fail to match up with reality, they blame the equation rather than their own poor choices of variable.

 

[NoXion]

Also, I'm more skeptical about these fast radio bursts being artificial in origin than I used to be.

The reasoning which convinced me goes something like this: since intelligence, as far as we know, takes billions of years to arise at least once, then advanced alien civilisations must become increasingly rare the further we look back in time. Yet these fast radio bursts are the opposite, they become rarer as we look closer to our planet in space-time. I'm probably not conveying the entire argument since I only half-remember it, but I find it pretty persuasive nonetheless.

These are truly titanic quantities of energy that are involved in FRBs, literally stellar in scope. Since FTL travel appears to be out of the question, any interstellar empire would necessarily take considerable time to establish.

 

[Epona]

You're the dude at the beginning of the movie who everyone hates because he's all like 'I'm not going to give this plucky underdog hero 100 billion dollars and all the nuclear launch codes just because he thinks aliens are coming' and then the audience is all like 'yeah fuck you' when the big explosions start at the end of act one and you're the first named character to get vapourised.

Fuck whether aliens are nearby... why is it a dude at the beginning of the movie (or in any other role in it?) We need to sort this shit out on our own planet before worrying about what else is going on.

 

[weltweit]

So, something happened 3 billion light-years ago out there.

How many years in a light year?

Those flashes happened a long long time ago!!

 

[strung out]

So, something happened 3 billion light-years ago out there.

How many years in a light year?

Those flashes happened a long long time ago!!

Not sure if you understand what a light year is

 

[iona]

How many years in a light year?

One



And almost 5,900,000,000,000 miles

 

[existentialist]

So, something happened 3 billion light-years ago out there.

How many years in a light year?

Those flashes happened a long long time ago!!

A light year is a measure of distance, not time.

It's the distance a beam of light travels in one year and as iona points out, is a very long way.

The "year" bit comes in because the light we see from a distant star is as many years old as the star is light years away. So if a star 300 light years blew up, it'd take 300 years for us to know.

 

[cheesethief]

No. Drake may have formulated the equation, but as far as I know he didn't specify what numbers should be filled in for each variable.

I don't know why people shit on the Drake equation for not having all the answers, when it was never intended to. Drake wasn't an idiot, he knew that some of the variables weren't known at the time he formulated them. I think people dismiss the equation because they plug optimistic numbers into it, and then when the ensuing results fail to match up with reality, they blame the equation rather than their own poor choices of variable.

I don't have any problem with the Drake equation per se, it's the marketing & hype that I object to. His equation was only ever really indented to stimulate debate about the existence of intelligent life in the universe, and in that regard it has succeeded. However the popular notion often perpetuated by the media is that the Drake equation actually tells us something tangible, as if it's a profound step closer to answering one of the biggest questions in the universe, when it's really not. And some of the terms in his equation would require knowledge of a kind that, if we are able to discern it, we'd probably have already answered the overall question aeons ago.

It's a clever notion, but it doesn't really tell us anything beyond "When we know the answer to all these incredibly difficult questions, we'll know the overall result".

Well yeah, we will. That's kind of a given.

What has it really told us? Nothing. What does it add to the body of scientific knowledge? Not much. Is it even practically testable? Not really.

So yes, it's good marketing, it gets people talking about the subject, but it has very little scientific value and doesn't deserve to be held aloft as some profound insight.

 

[existentialist]

I don't have any problem with the Drake equation per se, it's the marketing & hype that I object to. His equation was only ever really indented to stimulate debate about the existence of intelligent life in the universe, and in that regard it has succeeded. However the popular notion often perpetuated by the media is that the Drake equation actually tells us something tangible, as if it's a profound step closing to answering one of the biggest questions in the universe, when it's really not. And some of the terms in his equation would require knowledge of a kind that, if we are able to discern it, we'd probably have already answered the overall question aeons ago.

It's a clever notion, but it doesn't really tell us anything beyond "When we know the answer to all these incredibly difficult questions, we'll know the overall result".

Well yeah, we will. That's kind of a given.

What has it really told us? Nothing. What does it add to the body of scientific knowledge? Not much. Is it even practically testable? Not really.

So yes, it's good marketing, it gets people talking about the subject, but it has very little scientific value and doesn't deserve to be held aloft as some profound insight.

Yeah, this. It's like Schrödinger's cat - nobody actually puts cats in boxes with radioactive isotopes and poison. It's just a thought experiment to illustrate a point.