"Radio signals aliens" can occur every second

Mysterious fast radiospace, the nature of which remains a mystery to scientists, can occur in the night sky every second, say astronomers in an article published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"For a while, until you drink a Cup of coffee, the sky should flash hundreds FRB-flares that occurred in different parts and depths of the Universe. If we are able to study at least a small share of them, then we will be able to understand what generates them and where they occur," said Abraham Loeb (Abraham Loeb) from the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysical center (USA).

For the first time about the existence of a mysterious flares of radio emission (fast radio burst FRB) astronomers began in 2007, when they were accidentally discovered during observations of radio pulsars using the Parkes telescope (Australia).

In subsequent years, scientists were able to find traces of nine of these bursts, the comparison of which showed that they might have an artificial origin, and even potentially be signals of extraterrestrial civilizations due to the unexplained periodicity in their structure.

In the spring of last year, scientists have found that the source of one of such FRB-flares were an elliptical galaxy located 6 billion light years from the milky Way that caused them to conclude that such outbursts are born during the merging of neutron stars or other compact objects, turning into a black hole.

In the future, astrophysicists have discovered that the FRB-flash again and revealed other unusual properties incompatible with the main "natural" versions of their birth, put these theories into question.

Loeb and his colleague Anastasia Violet (Anastasia Fialkov) found that these outbreaks may occur more frequently than previously thought, scientists analyzing recent data on the flash FRB 121102, originally open at the Parkes Observatory in 2012 and recently re-recorded by the telescopes of Listen Breakthrough project aimed at the search for extraterrestrial life.

These repeated bursts, as noted by Loeb, has helped scientists to understand where the source of these radio signals – it was a galaxy about 3 billion light years from the milky Way. After studying the properties of this galaxy and the spectrum of the flare, Harvard astrophysicists have tried to calculate how often they occur in the Universe as a whole, if they are born only in such "star cities".

As shown by these calculations, every day in the Universe should be at least 35 of the thousands of such flashes, which means that each new "radio alien" must be born in less than a second after the previous FRB-burst.

Earth Observatory see only a small part of these signals for two reasons – their sensitivity is too low to detect them, and most of these events occur in galaxies much more distant from Earth than the source of the outbreak FRB 121102, and so their capacity drops sharply on the way to our planet.

If the assumptions of Loeb and Violet are confirmed, they suggest using the FRB-flash to determine how expanding the universe, disclosure of the properties of the interstellar environment and improve the quality of observations of a kind of "echo" of the Big Bang, microwave background the study of the Universe.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»