Are aliens trying to contact Earth?

Of all the mysterious astronomical phenomena, none has caused such a stir in recent years as the so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs). These strangely bright flashes of light, recorded in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, appear temporarily and randomly from space.

Possibly originating from black holes, neutron stars, or even sent by aliens, they last from a fraction of a millisecond to several seconds before disappearing without a trace. Now, researchers have announced that they have discovered five new such phenomena thanks to the upgrade of the Westerbork Synthesis radio telescope in the Netherlands.

Traveling to Earth through space, three of these flares pierced our neighboring Triangular Galaxy and a spiral galaxy about 2.73 million light-years away.

New outbreaks were discovered in 2019, but only now have they been detailed in a new paper by an international team led by Jori van Leeuwen of the University of Amsterdam.

“Fast radio bursts (FRBs) must be driven by radiation mechanisms with unique energies,” the article says.

“We have discovered five new FRBs, a significant addition to the approximately 100 published to date.”

FRBs are radio waves, so they are not visible to the human eye, but they are not unusual. They come from everywhere, but for many years baffled researchers, because their cause is poorly understood.

Perhaps they are emitted by neutron stars – the collapsing cores of some massive stars that have a mass roughly equal to that of our sun in a region the size of a city.

But scientists have also suggested that these could be artificial signals created by sentient beings.

In 2017, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said they could come from distant alien transmitters powering interstellar probes.

Professor Avi Loeb said that the artificial origin of these signals is “worth studying.”

When a single FRB fires, it is 10 trillion times the annual energy consumption of the entire population of the world.

The flares are so powerful that radio telescopes can detect them from more than four billion light-years away.

But studying them is difficult because no one knows where the next surge will occur. Moreover, each of them usually lasts only a millisecond (although last year, experts announced the discovery of a burst that lasted as much as 3 seconds, which is 1000 times longer than usual).

Therefore, experts rely on ground-based telescopes around the world to capture these temporary radio bursts whenever they occur.

Astronomers have upgraded the radio telescope array at Westerbork with a new supercomputer called the Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS). Westerbork was built on the site of a former Nazi POW camp from World War II.

“You can’t just go out and buy the sophisticated electronics you need to study the sky,” said study author Eric Koistra of the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy.

“We developed most of the systems ourselves. The result is a state-of-the-art machine, one of the most powerful in the world.”

Previously, radio telescopes could only roughly pinpoint where FRBs occurred, but now ARTS allows experts to pinpoint their exact location.

FRBs are known to pierce other galaxies on their way to Earth, and the electrons in these galaxies, usually mostly invisible, distort the flares. Keeping track of invisible electrons and their accompanying atoms is important because most of the matter in the universe is dark and we still know little about it.

The study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.