Dozens of Repetitive Radio Signals Discovered from Galaxy 3 Billion Light-years

Scientists have used artificial intelligence to discover 72 undiscovered fast radio bursts – mysterious spatial signals that span billions of years of light through space and blink for a fraction of a second – reported the Break-Percing project listen.

Nobody knows the origin of these elusive and fast signals, but researchers have speculated that some of them came from neutron stars located near black holes, interstellar clouds or nebulae. Some even think that they could be a sign of extraterrestrial life. Most FRBs are detected only once, but only one, FRB 121102, has been issued yet.

Researchers at the cutting edge of listening Listen – a program supported by scientists like the late Stephen Hawking – used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to investigate the FRB in August 2017. Vishal Gajjar, of UC Berkeley, and his team have three billion years of galaxy in data collected over a five-hour period.

Scientists have now developed a machine learning algorithm that has forced tens of additional FRBs from the same set of data. The Berkeley PhD student neural network algorithm, Gerry Zhang, and his colleagues reviewed some 400 terabytes of data to reveal additional FRBs. According to Breakthrough Listen, this type of technology is used to optimize search engines and sort images.

The new results suggest that bursts are not received on a regular basis, the program says. Scientists hope that this type of information will help to reduce possible explanations for FRB sources. Zhang and Gajjar's research papers were accepted for publication in The astrophysical journal.

The telescope of the green bank. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / Getty Images

"This work is only the beginning of using these powerful methods to detect radio transients," Zhang said in a Breakthrough Listen statement. "We hope our success will inspire other serious efforts to apply machine learning to radio astronomy."

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"[Zhang’s] The work is exciting not only because it helps us to understand the dynamic behavior of FRBs in greater detail, "said Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SEI) Research Director and Andrew Siemion, Senior Research Scientist. using machine learning to detect signals missed by conventional algorithms. "

Although they appear across the sky, telescopes probably lack many mysterious explosions as they generally monitor relatively small areas. Scientists have recently started using the Canadian hydrogen intensity mapping (CHIME) experiment to search the FRB sky. With a wide field of view, researchers hope that the telescope will drastically improve the number of strange flashes observed in space.

Although some scientists believe that the signals may have foreign sources, others say that this is unlikely. Gajjar said previously Newsweek he did not think they came from distant foreign civilizations because gusts "occur everywhere in the sky and show similar properties". If extraterrestrials wanted to make contact, they would modify signals like the FRB to communicate their artificial nature.