Radio signals from space have just reached Earth: proof of extraterrestrial life or is it something else? | Science | New



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Mysterious radio signals are called "Fast Radio Bursts" or "FRB" (Fast Radio Bursts) from an unknown source in the cosmos. Thanks to the Canadian radio station CHIME in British Columbia, astronomers have identified eight of these radio chips on Earth. FRBs are extremely short radio waves and only last a few milliseconds at a time. Discovered for the first time in 2007, the FRB has been a source of confusion for the scientific community.

Astronomers do not know where the FRBs come from, but each new detection brings us closer to resolving the mystery.

A new study, previously published on the arXiv.org archive website, revealed eight new repeat FRBs detected in Canada.

The study reads as follows: "We report the discovery of eight sources of repeated fast radio gusts found using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope."

Pragya Chawla, a Ph.D. student at the McGill Space Science Institute, who co-authored the paper, said, "The discovery of eight sources like this one is very important because it indicates that we have a lot more FRB repetitive and that we can understand the environments and galaxies in which these FRBs are. if we follow them with other telescopes. "

READ MORE: Are the FRB a strange proof of extraterrestrial life?

What are Fast Radio Bursts (FRB)?

The FRB is a fairly recent discovery and remains one of the biggest unknowns in the universe.

Scientists have described these signals as being 1,000 times weaker than a cell phone found on the surface of the moon.

The first sign of a FRB was discovered in 2007, concealed in a 2001 dataset collected by the Parkes Observatory of New South Wales, Australia.

Since the discovery, astronomers have slightly expanded their understanding of FRB by learning that some signals are repeated.

Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University, told CBC: "The first major conclusion is that it is not an abnormal phenomenon. This is for real.

"It just takes time and patience to find them. And second, it offers the opportunity to locate them, which is huge in the FRB domain. "

READ MORE: The cosmic mystery of "fast radio bursts" of space defeats astronomers

Scientists have traced signals from repeaters to galaxies billions of light years away to show that they are not specific to a particular group of stars.

The FRB, for example, was located in a galaxy of the Grus constellation at four billion light-years away.

One theory assumes that radio bursts are a side effect of collision of dense neutron stars with black holes.

Another theory suggests that FRBs are produced by magnetars – neutron stars with incredibly powerful magnetic fields.

Be that as it may, there is no clear consensus or evidence to fully elucidate the mystery.

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