RAS expert Mereminsky said that the latest signals from space did not come from aliens

There are no sufficient grounds to suggest that the source of fast radio bursts could be extraterrestrial civilizations. Most likely, they come from magnetars, said Ilya Mereminsky, a researcher at the Department of High Energy Astrophysics at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS), in an interview with RIA Novosti.

Earlier, an international team of researchers discovered a remote burst of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond in a galaxy so distant that the light took eight billion years to reach Earth. Scientists cannot yet unambiguously determine the cause of such radio bursts, but some media continue to call them “alien signals.”

Mereminsky emphasized that there is no reason to believe that this is connected with extraterrestrial life. He explained that similar events occur in our galaxy and are likely associated with magnetars – neutron stars with strong magnetic fields. He also noted that magnetars should not be assumed to be home to life.

The scientist called the new discovery of fast radio bursts at record distances an “interesting” but expected event. He explained that they had recently been discovered due to various technical reasons, their nature was explored, and then they began to be actively explored and found at increasingly greater distances. Now it has been possible to detect radio bursts at a significant cosmological distance, twice as large as previous results.

Fast radio bursts, also known as FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), are single radio pulses of unknown origin that are detected by radio telescopes. The first fast radio burst was recorded in February 2007.

Magnetars are neutron stars with the strongest magnetic fields observed in the Universe. These ultra-compact objects have a diameter of 12 to 20 kilometers and a mass comparable to or greater than the mass of the Sun. Magnetars emit powerful bursts of X-rays and gamma rays.