Radio Bursts From Space Reveal Strange Mathematical Pattern

[Ryan Ruck]

Radio Bursts From Space Reveal Strange Mathematical Pattern

April 6, 2015

Eleven fast radio bursts from space seem to follow a strange mathematical pattern, according to a new study – and it has researchers scratching their heads.

According to study co–authors Michael Hippke of the Institute of Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned of the University of Hawaii in Manoa, the bursts– which were first detected in 2001 – all had dispersion measures that were integer multiples of the same number: 187.5. “The astronomers that found [the bursts] have not seen such things before and do not understand them,” Learned told FoxNews.com.

Nobody knows what causes fast radio bursts, known as FRBs. They only last a few milliseconds, and only one so far has been captured live (by the Parkes Telescope in Australia last year). Though the bursts release just as much energy in a few milliseconds as the sun does in a month, their brevity indicates that the source must be small, with estimates being several hundred miles across at most.

Researchers use dispersion measures, which records how much “space gunk” the burst has passed through, to estimate the distance an FRB has travelled. For instance, a low frequency FRB will have more gunk on it, indicating a longer trip, whereas a high frequency FRB will be cleaner, indicating it came from closer to Earth.

The fact that all of the FRBs’ dispersion measures are integer multiples of 187.5 has, according to Hippke and Learned’s team’s calculations, a 5 in 10,000 chance of being coincidental. The dispersion measures also indicate that their origin is relatively close to Earth, but unlikely from within our own galaxy.

There are numerous theories on where these bursts came from, including speculation that the messages are from extraterrestrial intelligence. To the scientific community, however, this theory doesn’t really hold water, and is seen as more of a last resort only after all other avenues have been exhausted.

“We think these are likely from some very energetic process, like a burst from a high magnetic field neutron star or energy released [when] two neutron stars merge,” Professor Maura McLaughlin of the West Virginia University Center for Astrophysics explained. “The thing that made people think they were possibly from ETs was a recent paper that showed that one fundamental property is quantized in a way that wouldn't be expected if the signals were naturally occurring. However, I imagine that correlation will totally go away once more are discovered.”

Learned himself is dubious of an alien source as well, noting that he and Hippke only noted the dispersion measures’ “peculiar” pattern, and that they may even be coming from Earth. “We are now leaning more towards a terrestrial, anthropogenic interpretation,” he said. “At this point I would place my money on some sort of governmental satellite, not a natural phenomena, but I would not bet much. More data, which reportedly [is] being analyzed but which we have no insider information about yet, will be most interesting and refute or confirm our hypotheses.” He also noted that he’d only look to an ETI interpretation once all other possibilities have been eliminated.

As for McLaughlin, she believes there’s no way the FRBs could be messages from aliens, as the signals are very broadband and emitted over a wide range of radio frequencies. “It would take a LOT of energy for an alien civilization to produce these bursts - they'd need to harness the energy of many, many suns - and there's no real advantage for communication to send a signal over such a large bandwidth.”

[American Patriot]

Nice....

they're HERE................................

[American Patriot]

I am seeing one or two issues with this. First...

As for McLaughlin, she believes there’s no way the FRBs could be messages from aliens, as the signals are very broadband and emitted over a wide range of radio frequencies. “It would take a LOT of energy for an alien civilization to produce these bursts - they'd need to harness the energy of many, many suns - and there's no real advantage for communication to send a signal over such a large bandwidth.”

"No way they could be messages from aliens because signals are broadband".

Bad, very bad scientific assumption. IF I were going to try to reach an unknown person or persons, I would NOT use narrow band signals. I'd signal over as wide a bandwidth as possible and impress whatever intelligence on the signal I could so.

Second I'd not AIM it in one direction, it would omni-directional, until I had determined the general direction of the entity which I am trying to signal.

Third, a signal aimed in a uni-directional manner would be amplified many, many times using a directional antenna capable of many factors of gain. This would redirect the amount of energy used in ONE direction instead of all directions and thus make the signal appear VERY strong.

Fourth, the advantage of sending a strong signal over a very LARGE bandwidth is quite obvious to a radio communicator. As stated in number one above, to gain the attention of many people in a vast area, you spread the signal across all possible frequencies on which the people would be listening!

Discounting a possible communication from extraterrestrials is like discounting all those pennies you keep in your pockets and end up collecting at home on the night stand. Eventually, the money adds up and eventually, discounting the possibility of ET sending signals may cause us to A) Miss the fact they are there, B) Be surprised when they arrive and take over.

Never say "impossible". Never say, "It's not going to happen here". ANYTHING is possible. The probabilities might be incredibly low, but ANYTHING is possible in this Universe. The rules of physics are are simply no immutable at this point and we don't know everything there is know about everything.

[American Patriot]

Mysterious radio bursts received on Earth from deep space

Reported by: `Customs Today Report April 8, 2015
CANADA: In the event that you were a Morse code agent getting messages and ran over something that couldn’t be random, you would think it was from people, i.e. brilliant creatures, isn’t that so? All things considered, that is pretty much what researchers got from space in radio bursts.
Strange radio bursts got on Earth from deep space were sent in dispersion measures that couldn’t be random events, researchers say, proposing that they may have originated from brilliant aliens.
Professor John Learned from the University of Hawaii said of the fast radio bursts (FRBs) “If the pattern is real … it is very, very hard to explain.”
A radio telescope grabbed a FRB a year ago surprisingly since 2001. FRBs are amazingly short radio bursts from probably billions of miles away in profound space that last simply a couple of milliseconds.
Astrophysicists have no clue where FRBs originate from. Most propose they begin from a few billions of light years from here. In any case, they could start much closer to home, they include.
Although to a great degree short in span, every FRB has more vitality that that discharged by our Sun in 24 hours.

[American Patriot]

Alien life signals? Radio bursts in strange mathematical pattern heard in space


April 6, 2015 4:04 PM MST

Is this an intelligent life form? Radio bursts with a strange mathematical pattern come from space. There is only a 5 in 10,000 chance that this pattern is a coincidence. They are reoccurring and scientists are baffled.
YouTube screen shot

Reoccurring radio bursts from space have revealed a strange mathematical pattern and the thought of these signals coming from an intelligent life form is one of the theories attached to this phenomenon today. Scientist have calculated that these patterns have only a 5 in 10,000 chance of being a coincidence. These radio bursts are coming from a source that is fairly close to earth, but most likely not inside the galaxy, according to Fox News on April 6.
The theories surrounding these radio bursts today include messages coming from extraterrestrial intelligence. The radio bursts have scientists baffled because they are too far away statistically from being coincidental. This leaves some scientist to considering the theory that something intelligent may be trying to communicate. Still many scientists are a long way from giving any consideration to this theory.
The study co-authors Michael Hippke of the Institute of Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned of the University of Hawaii have researched these bursts, which were first detected in 2001. Learned told Fox News that “The astronomers that found [the bursts] have not seen such things before and do not understand them.”
These radio bursts, called FRBs, only last a few milliseconds and the Parkes Telescope in Australia was able to catch one live last year. That is the only time one has been captured live. The scientists estimate that they are coming from a fairly small source in the scope of things. They calculate that the source of these bursts is several hundred miles across at the most, according to the Huffington Post.
While the source is small, the energy in these radio bursts is immense. These radio bursts release just as much energy in their few milliseconds as the sun does in a month. As far as the distance these radio bursts have traveled, the scientist are able to measure the “gunk” that comes in on these bursts to estimate distance. Low frequency bursts will have more gunk on it, which indicates a longer trip from its source to get to the Earth.
High frequency radio bursts, which come in “clean” with very little gunk attached to it, have come from a shorter distance, meaning its source is closer to Earth. “Closer to Earth” in the scope of the vast outer space doesn’t mean it is hanging around somewhere within the planets of this solar system. It is most likely outside the galaxy.
As far as this being radio bursts from an intelligent source, this is usually the last theory scientist like to apply to a phenomenon. But it is hard to apply some random force of natural occurrence to the mathematical pattern seen with these radio bursts or FRBs.
Skeptics are dismissing the theory of an intelligent source, like Professor Maura McLaughlin of the West Virginia University Center for Astrophysics. McLaughlin said, “The thing that made people think they were possibly from ETs was a recent paper that showed that one fundamental property is quantized in a way that wouldn't be expected if the signals were naturally occurring. However, I imagine that correlation will totally go away once more are discovered.”
Learner is also not ready to go ET as of yet and will only look at a possible ET source once all other avenues have been eliminated. McLaughlin isn’t going with the ET explanation either, as she feels these radio bursts are “very broadband” and “emitted over a wide range of radio frequencies.” She feels it would take a lot of energy for an alien to produce these bursts and they would need to harness the energy of many suns to do this, so her vote is not with the radio bursts coming from an ET source.
No one could possibly know what intelligent life forms would look like, but better yet, no one could possibly imagine their capabilities. Harnessing the power of many suns seems like an impossible feat to those here on Earth, but what if an alien race is so far advanced that they do this with ease?
No one knows what lies beyond and we can’t limit the possibilities by assuming if there is anything alive and kicking besides us out there, that this intelligent life force is limited to technology similar to ours.

[American Patriot]

Strange radio bursts detected from outside our galaxy could point to intelligent life

By April Toche | BABW News | April 06, 2015

Some scientists believe that these recent radio bursts are too frequent to be a coincidence.


Scientists say that there have been radio bursts occurring repeatedly from space, having only a 5 in 10,000 chance that it could be just coincidence. Theorists believe it could be from some form of intelligent life, but most likely not inside our own galaxy. Most scientists agree that the bursts are coming from too far a distance from earth to simply be happenstance. However, only a few scientists thus far believe it may be intelligent life attempting to talk to us. The majority of the scientific community is simply scratching their heads. The astronomers that discovered the strange sounds have never encountered anything on par with it before, leaving them quite baffled.
The radio bursts are known as FRBs, and they only go on for milliseconds. Luckily, the Parkes Telescope found in Australia was able to capture the only live one in existence so far. The Huffington Post says that, more than likely, these bursts can be no more than a few hundred miles across. Although it may be a small source, the energy these bursts are able to produce is more than the sun can in one month. Scientists believe that since there is little gunk attached to the radio bursts, the source of the sounds are coming from somewhere that is not extremely far from earth, but not in the same galaxy either.


Many skeptics are completely dismissing even the thought of alien life as the source, and Professor Maura McLaughlin of the West Virginia University Center for Astrophysics said, “The thing that made people think they were possibly coming from ETs was a recent paper that showed that one fundamental property is quantized in a way that wouldn’t be expected if the signals were naturally occurring.
However, I imagine that correlation will totally go away once more are discovered.”

[American Patriot]

I knew it!

I KNEW IT!

The signals came from intelligent life forms!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mysterious Radio Signals Came From Microwave Oven, Not Outer Space

9

Maddie Stone

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Maddie StoneFiled to: radio bursts

• astronomy
• pertyons

4/12/15 2:00pm

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Sometimes, the powerful radio bursts detected by our telescopes have the look of alien beacons, or other strange astronomical phenomena. Other times, they’re caused by scientists reheating coffee.


The latter happens to be the case when it comes to the origin of mysterious radio signals known as perytons. For years, astronomers at the Parkes Observatory in Australia have puzzled over these brief but intense bursts, which in some ways appeared to emanate from deep space. But unlike the fast radio bursts we’ve also heard about recently, researchers knew that perytons were actually coming from somewhere nearby, because they would simultaneously show up in multiple viewing fields rather than emanating from a single source.


But no one suspected perytons were coming from the lunch room, until astronomer Emily Petroff decided to install a real-time radio interference monitor at the Parkes telescope. National Geographic’s Nadia Drake describes what happened next:

In January, the telescope detected three of the [peryton] signals – and the interference monitor picked up three simultaneous interference signatures. The team recognized the interloping frequencies as possibly belonging to a microwave oven.


When Petroff and her colleagues tested their hypothesis, they found they could create perytons on demand simply by opening the oven door before the timer had dinged.

There you have it. One astronomical mystery, at least, has a simple answer: people are impatient to get at their Hot Pockets. Apparently, when you open a microwave oven’s door before the timer goes off, the magnetron inside doesn’t have time to shut off completely, so you end up releasing a burst of radio waves into the room.


It remains to be seen whether fast radio bursts will also end up having an Earthly origin. But with the way things have been going, I’ll admit my faith that aliens are trying to snapchat us from deep space is flagging a bit.


Now, aliens living inside my microwave oven, that’s another story.


Read a pre-print of the scientific paper at arXiv.

[American Patriot]

I'm going to add a bunch more articles here... not so much because each is new and different, but I've discovered that sometimes it takes digging all this crap out, and searching through each one for a new piece of the puzzle. Just like the attacks on various places when the news starts coming in, we don't get enough information (and likely never get it all)

So here goes:



Odd radio signals from space intrigue scientists

Science

by Shreya Shetty - Apr 7, 2015
0 1642

New evidence suggests that aliens are communicating with us through radio signals and according to the scientists concerned, they’re saying ‘187.5’. At least, this what radio astrophysicists who have been observing this phenomenon since 2008 have concluded.

As part of a German-US collaborative project, Michael Hippke and his colleagues have been using radio telescopes located at Parkes, Australia and Arecibo, Puerto Rico to study 11 radio signals called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) of supposed extragalactic origin. These pulses which were first observed in 2001 are of high intensities. Based on their Dispersion Measure (DM) value patterns, the researchers propose that the FRBs could be artificial and ‘non-human made’. But the scientists emphasize the need for more observations which could support or refute their current conclusions.

Parkes Radio Telescope

Radio waves are emitted by neutron stars like pulsars or magnetars in a continuous manner. FRBs are peculiar in the sense that they are produced as powerful waves but last for short periods. The distance of the source of FRBs can be estimated using a unit known as Dispersion Measure (DM). As the radio waves pass through space, they randomly collide with electrons which delay their time of detection on earth. DM quantifies this time lag in terms of distance. Interestingly, all the DM values of the 11 FRBs are in common multiples of the value 187.5cm-3 pc (1pc=1parsec=3.26 light years) such as 375cm-3 pc, 56cm-3 pc and 1125cm-3 pc.

While speaking to Forbes, Hippke said that this finding could mean each of the 11 radio signals are being transmitted from separate and equidistant locations, several billions of kilometers away from each other. But according to the scientists, the likelihood of this occurring is 5 in 10000. An alternate theory is that the FRBs are emitted from within our galaxy and generated in small pulses of high and low intensities. Both these theories are however not explained by current models of radio astronomy. They suggest a novel idea which speculates about these FRBs being synthetic in origin and possibly produced by human- or alien-made devices.

The scientists have published their data in the online open access website, ArXiv. Though the existence of extraterrestrials is still a hot topic, this new evidence definitely adds ammunition to alien life theorists’ arguments.

[American Patriot]

Aliens Contacting Us? Radio Waves from Space Reach Earth in Bizarre Mathematical Pattern

Ana Verayo |

Apr 06, 2015 06:56 AM EDT

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(Photo : Contact ) Are aliens out there? Jodie Foster wants to find out.






Scientists believe mysterious bursts of energy beams from space apparently have mathematical patterns that could suggest alien intelligence and technology.

These beams called blitzars or fast radio bursts only last for a millisecond but they've been detected by telescopes beginning in 2001. The latest burst was detected in 2014 by the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.


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Since this time, there have been 10 incidents where scientists detected these frequencies. Apart from this, no further information can be derived from these mysterious signals such as their origins and the real meaning behind them.

A new study revealed these energy bursts are aligned in such a way that's not according to the laws of physics. Scientists are now investigating how these bursts traveled into deep space and reached the Earth with "dispersion measures".


This method involves examining radio waves that are scattered when they travel through space. The higher the dispersion measure, the farther the radiowaves originate from before hitting Earth.


In a bizarre coincidence, all the 10 energy bursts detected produced dispersion measures with multiples of a single number, which is 187.5. Scientists involved in the study claim that the chances of this occurring are 5 in 10,000.


This line up of multiples of 187.5 is apparently "very, very hard to explain", according to study lead author John Learned of the University of Hawaii in Manoa along with Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Germany.


Researchers now consider two theories behind this phenomenon. The first theory believes each of the bursts was transmitted in regularly spaced intervals from five sources at equally spaced distances from Earth.


Scientists also believe they originate somewhere closer to home such as the Milky Way galaxy but a delay is being applied to match the bizarre, mathematical pattern.


Scientists say it's remotely possible these energy bursts are being emitted by stars or stellar objects. Stars have been known to emit radio wave bursts but without any sort of regular pattern. It could also be an unknown theory in astrophysics scientists have yet to decipher could explain these bursts of radio waves from space.

[American Patriot]

Unexplained Intergalactic Radio Bursts Confirmed At Arecibo

George Dvorsky

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George Dvorsky4/21/14 9:00pm






Back in 2011 and 2012, astronomers working at an Australian observatory picked up a series of fleeting but powerful radio signals. These signals have never been detected elsewhere, casting doubts on their origin. But now, new observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest they're for real.
Top image: Impression of a blitzar — a hypothetical object that could be the source of the radio bursts. Image: Sky & Telescope/Gregg Dinderman.
Up until this point, the only observatory to detect these signals has been the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The dozen-or-so bursts that appeared in 2011-12 likely originated from outside the galaxy. In just a few milliseconds, each of the radio bursts released as much energy as the sun emits in 300,000 years.
Astronomers have all kinds of theories as to what may be triggering the bursts, including blitzars — overweight neutron stars that are resisting the urge to turn into a black hole on account of their rapid rotation. Other theories include magnetars, which are neutron stars with super-strong magnetic fields, evaporating black holes, and gamma ray bursts that involve a supernova.
The new observations were made at Arecibo on November 2, 2012, home to the world's largest single-dish radio. The data showed a massive 3-millisecond spike, but unlike radio blasts produced by some pulsars, the burst did not recur.
Writing in National Geographic, Nadia Drake reports on the new discovery:

Called FRB 121102, the burst was very similar to six earlier events that constitute the entire reported population of ultrafast radio bursts – a population that until November 2012 had only been seen by one telescope, in Australia.
But transience is only part of what makes these signals so weird. Their chief peculiarity lies in just how dang far away they seem to be.
Normally, radio waves travel at the speed of light. This means that all the different wavelengths and frequencies of radio waves emitted by the same object – say, a pulsar – should arrive on Earth in one big batch.
But if something is sufficiently far away, that changes. Longer, lower frequency waves traveling through the cosmos have a trickier time getting to Earth. Clouds of ionized interstellar particles – electrons, primarily – form roadblocks that slow and redirect these longer waves, causing them to follow a more sinuous path. As a result, the longer waves arrive just a bit later than their shorter kin – sometimes, the difference is only a fraction of a second.

The resulting "dispersion" delay is what's allowing astronomers to estimate how far the waves are coming from. In this case, it's something billions and billions of light-years away.
Much more at NatGeo. You can read a pre-print of the study here.

[American Patriot]

BTW the links given in each of the articles appears to be dead or removed


Science
An Alien Radio Beacon? Probably Not This Time

Maddie Stone 5 April 2015 8:30 AM
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For nearly a decade, astronomers have puzzled over powerful bursts of radio energy that seem to be hailing from billions of light years away. Recently, we received reports of a new wrinkle to this mystery: The bursts appear to follow a mathematical pattern, one that doesn’t line up with anything we know about cosmic physics.

And, of course, when we hear “mathematical pattern,” “radio transmission,” and “outer space,” all strung together, we immediately jump to our favourite explanation — aliens! (Or, you know, a decaying pulsar star, an unmapped spy satellite, or a cell phone tower.)
It’s also possible that the pattern doesn’t actually exist.
Since 2007, telescopes have picked up nearly a dozen so-called “fast radio bursts,” pulses that last for mere milliseconds, but erupt with as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Where could they be coming from? To find out, a group of researchers took advantage of a simple principle: That higher frequency radio waves encounter less interference as they traverse space, and are detected by our telescopes earlier than lower frequency waves. The time delay, or “dispersion measure”, between higher and lower frequency radio waves from the same pulse event can be used to determine the distance those waves travelled.
Here’s where things got weird. When researchers calculated the dispersion distance for each of eleven fast radio bursts, they found that each distance is an integer multiple of a single number: 187.5. When plotted on a graph, as the researchers show us in Figure 1 of their paper, the points form a striking pattern.
One explanation is that the bursts are coming from different sources, all at regularly spaced intervals from the Earth, billions of light years away. They could also be caused by a small cosmic object much closer to home, such as a pulsar star, behaving according to some sort of physics we don’t yet understand. And then there’s the possibility that aliens are trying to communicate, by blasting simple numeric patterns into space.

But no matter how you slice it, eleven data points is a small sample set to draw any meaningful conclusions from. A handful of deviant observations could cause the entire pattern to unravel.
And that’s exactly what seems to be happening. As Nadia Drake reports for National Geographic, newer observations, not included in the latest scientific report or other popular media articles, don’t fit:

“There are five fast radio bursts to be reported,” says Michael Kramer of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. “They do not fit the pattern.”
Instead of aliens, unexpected astrophysics, or even Earthly interference, the mysterious mathematical pattern is probably an artifact produced by a small sample size, Ransom says. When working with a limited amount of data — say, a population of 11 fast radio bursts — it’s easy to draw lines that connect the dots. Often, however, those lines disappear when more dots are added.
“My prediction is that this pattern will be washed out quite quickly once more fast radio bursts are found,” says West Virginia University’s Duncan Lorimer, who reported the first burst in 2007. “It’s a good example of how apparently significant results can be found in sparse data sets.”

That’s a bit of a bummer, but still, these radio bursts are fascinating, and what could be causing them remains as much of a mystery as ever. It could even still be aliens, if not an alien beacon. As SETI Institute Director Seth Shostak told me in an email:

“If it’s a signal, well, it’s certainly NOT a message — except maybe to say ‘here we are’. There’s not real bandwidth to it, which means these fast radio bursts can’t encode many bits. But there are so many other possibilities, I think that automatically attributing something in the sky that we don’t (at first) understand to the work of aliens is … premature!”

If there’s one thing that is clear in this whole business, it’s that we’ve still got plenty to learn about the patterns woven into the universe around us.
Read a pre-print of the scientific paper on arXiv.
Images: Shutterstock, Hubble via Flickr

[American Patriot]

Last paragraph, is the most logical conclusion. Local, but unidentified source:




Are aliens trying to contact Earth through radio signals?

April 2, 2015


0
0 0Series of signals from deep space have mathematical pattern.

By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Scientists have been befuddled by a series of bizarre radio signals emanating from deep space since 2001, unable to determine what causes them and where they originated. Now, the enigma has become even more mysterious, as a new study indicates the “fast radio bursts” follow a distinct, mathematical pattern that researchers behind the paper say “is very hard to explain.”


“There is something really interesting we need to understand,” study co-author Michael Hippke, a scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, told New Scientist. “This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an E.T.”


Aside from extraterrestrials, National Geographic lists theories describing the radio bursts’ origin that range from evaporating primordial black holes, to neutron stars colliding with interstellar comets, “to things that are much closer to home – but are just pretending to be really far away.” Per one proposal by New Scientist, it’s even possible an unmapped spy satellite is beaming signals that are masquerading as deep space emissions.


Astronomers won’t be able to decipher much about the radio bursts until they know the distance over which they’re travelling. They estimate bursts’ distance using something called a dispersion measure, which represents the time differential between the detection of a burst’s high frequencies and its low frequencies. Low frequencies travel more slowly through space dust, and thus take longer than high frequencies to reach Earth, according to HuffPost Science.


To their surprise, they deduced the dispersion measure of every pulse was a multiple of the number 187.5.


Such an even spacing “is likely not produced by something like a supernova explosion,” Hippke told HuffPost Science via email. “All frequencies leave the nova at the same time, and the [dispersion measure] is created by dust crossing. As the amount of dust varies, the [dispersion measure] would seem random.”


Hippke also said the pulses could be generated by some as-yet-unidentified source here on Earth that emits short-frequency radio waves followed by high-frequency ones — perhaps something as simple as a cell phone base station. If that’s not the explanation, it’s possible they come from a yet-to-be-discovered cosmic object in deep space — or aliens.

[American Patriot]

Are these mystery radio bursts messages from ALIENS? Study finds freak frequencies from outside the Milky Way ALL form unexplained multiples of 187.5

• Scientists are trying to work out what is causing Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)
• The strange signals occur for a few milliseconds and come from nowhere
• The first was detected in 2007, but only a handful have been seen since
• Explanations range from colliding neutron stars to alien signals

By Jonathan O'Callaghan and Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com


Published: 18:14 EST, 31 March 2015 | Updated: 09:06 EST, 1 April 2015



A series of mysterious pulsing signals coming from outside our solar system form a strange unexplained pattern, researchers have revealed.



Known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), just 10 have been discovered - and astronomers have no idea what they are.
Now a new study has found that all 10 bursts' dispersion measures are multiples of a single number: 187.5
Scroll down for video




+4


In 2007 a radio burst was picked up by astronomer Duncan Lorimer and his team. The origin of the signal could be colliding neutron stars or possibly an alien message. This image shows the dispersed signal from the original millisecond radio burst that suggests it must have originated billions of light-years away



Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa made the discovery.



They claim there is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line-up is coincidence.



'If the pattern is real,' Learned told New Scientist, 'it is very, very hard to explain.'
The results imply five sources for the bursts are all at regularly spaced distances from Earth, billions of light-years away.



Hippke says, 'there is something really interesting we need to understand.



'This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an ET.



'When you set out to search for something new,' he says, 'you might find something unexpected.'



The FSB was first spotted in 1967 when British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system.



For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars.



However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we're picking up alien messages.





FRBs are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.



The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst, writes Katherine Mack of The Planetary Society.
WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE?

Flaring star
Some stars are known to suddenly flare up on occasion. It's possible that this event could send light through the thick ejected layers of a star's atmosphere in bursts, but if this were the cause we would expect to find FRBs towards variable stars (ones with fluctuating brightness) in our galaxy, which is not the case.
White dwarf merger



When two white dwarfs merge its possible they can combine into a larger, rapidly spinning white dwarf. This event could emit radiation from the poles consistent with FRBs and, if this is proved correct, it could indicate an association between FRBs and supernovae.



Neutron star collision



Ultra-dense stellar objects known as neutron stars could collide and release huge bursts of radiation before they merge - this event is already thought to be a cause of high-energy bursts known as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), and could also be the cause of FRBs.


Blitzar



Some neutron stars are regarded as being 'supramassive', which means they are so massive they should have already collapsed into a black hole but their rapid rotation keeps them alive. When they do suddenly collapse they release an intense burst of radio waves known as a blitzar, and within this emission FRBs could also be residing.





This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.



The first FRB was spotted, or rather 'heard' by radio telescopes, back in 2007 - but it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to even agree it wasn't a glitch in one of the telescope's instruments.



The signal, which lasted just five milliseconds, was named the Lorimer burst after its discoverer, Duncan Lorimer.




+4


The new study has found that all 10 bursts' dispersion measures are multiples of a single number: 187.5

The radio emission was so dispersed, experts suggested it must have come from a great distance away, possibly billions of light-years.
But early estimates said there should be 10,000 of these events a day – so the fact that another wasn't discovered until 2012 was troubling.
This was when data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia suggested it had heard another FRB, along with a handful of others, but the fact that only Parkes had detected the signals had some claiming these were merely instrument glitches.

+4


A follow-up observation was made by the Parkes Radio Telescope, time-lapse photo shown, in 2012. However it was not until April of this year that the signal was ruled out as an instrument glitch when the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico picked up a similar signal. But the mystery of its true origin persists

Incredible time-lapse captures the Parkes Radio Telescope





A recent discovery, in April of this year, of an FRB using the giant radio dish in Puerto Rico confirmed to astronomers that these signals are indeed real – but they're no closer to finding out an answer as to what they are.
Theories so far include flaring stars, white dwarfs merging, neutron stars colliding and – most intriguingly – alien signals.




+4


Aside from the extraterrestrial origin explanation, another is that it could be caused by the collision of two neutron stars (artist's illustration shown). When neutron stars collide a black hole is normally formed, in addition to a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than that of Earth, in just two milliseconds


'This extraordinary finding either indicates an as yet unknown or unusual astronomical phenomenon, or it could indicate that this is a vast alien communication network, and the universe is teeming with intelligent life forms,' says Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual.
'Every unusual signal from outer space encourages us to wonder if it is from an alien civilisation.
'Since this signal seems so elusive and hard to interpret then this should be a candidate for further analysis.
'It would be fantastic if this was an alien signal as the knowledge that we are not alone in this vast universe would have a dramatic impact on our perception of our place in the scheme of things.'
For now, however, FRBs remain very much a mystery.
It will take further studies and observations in future to truly determine where they come from, and what is causing them. Until then, it's difficult to rule any particular theory out of the window.

Read more:

• arxiv.org/abs/15...
• Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space - space - 31 March 2015 - New Scientist
• The Case of the 5-Millisecond Cosmic Radio Burst | The Planetary Society

[American Patriot]

Ok... finally someone mentioned the direction (something I've been digging for this morning was which part of the sky is this originating). Apparently from more than one direction though, it appears.

Cosmic radio burst caught in the act

Astronomers announced this week that – for the first time – they have observed a so-called ‘fast radio burst’ in real time.

Parkes Radio Telescope in Eastern Australia. A schematic illustration of CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope receiving the polarized signal from the new ‘fast radio burst.’ Image via Swinburne Astronomy Productions



Cosmic radio bursts – what astronomers call fast radio bursts – are bright flashes of radio waves, lasting only a few milliseconds. The first one was seen retroactively in 2007, only 3 degrees from the direction in space to the Small Magellanic Cloud. Before now, no fast radio burst was observed in real time. Even now, the source of the bursts is unknown. This week, an international team of astronomers reports a breakthrough. They say that – for the first time – they have observed a fast radio burst as it happened. These astronomers published their work in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


Carnegie Observatories was one of the multiple organizations involved with the new study. Its acting director John Mulchaey called fast radio bursts:

… one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.

That’s because, although in the past few years astronomers have retroactively observed a total of seven fast radio bursts, their origin remains utterly unknown. These bursts were found after the fact, by astronomers who combed through data from the Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. More recently, a team of astronomers in Australia developed a technique to search for fast radio bursts. In the current study, a group of astronomers, led by Emily Petroff (Swinburne University of Technology), has succeeded in observing the first burst in real time with the Parkes telescope.


In order to observe the fast radio burst in real time, the team mobilized 12 telescopes around the world and in space. Each telescope followed up on the original burst observation at different wavelengths, ranging from infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light and X-ray waves. The hope was that, in one wavelength or another, some source of the burst could be identified. This did not happen.


What did they learn then? The astronomers seem to agree that the characteristics of the event indicate that a source for the burst far beyond our galaxies boundaries. Even this has been controversial, with some astronomers claiming the bursts come from nearby stars.

The astronomers involved with this study, though, say the burst originated up to 5.5 billion light-years from Earth. If that is indeed the case, then the sources of these bursts must be extremely powerful.


So now what? The team captured the radio wave burst while it was happening and immediately made follow-up observations at other wavelengths. They did not see anything that would indicate the burst’s source. But they were able to rule out some possibilities.

Carnegie’s Mansi Kasliwal said:

Together, our observations allowed the team to rule out some of the previously proposed sources for the bursts, including nearby supernovae.


Short gamma-ray bursts are still a possibility, as are distant magnetic neutron stars called magnetars, but not long gamma-ray bursts.

Daniele Malesani, astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen, said:

We found out what it wasn’t. The burst could have hurled out as much energy in a few milliseconds as our sun does in an entire day. But the fact that we did not see light in other wavelengths eliminates a number of astronomical phenomena that are associated with violent events such as gamma-ray bursts from exploding stars and supernovae, which were otherwise candidates for the burst

And the burst left another clue. The Parkes detection system captured the polarization of the light. The orientation of the radio waves indicates that the burst likely originated near or passed through a magnetic field. Malesani said:

The theories are now that the radio wave burst might be linked to a very compact type of object — such as neutron stars or black holes and the bursts could be connected to collisions or ‘star quakes.’ Now we know more about what we should be looking for.

Bottom line: Astronomers announced this week that – for the first time – they have observed a fast radio burst in real time.

[American Patriot]

Searching for distant signals

A handful of fast radio bursts have astronomers puzzling over their origin, and looking for more


By
Christopher Crockett

3:55pm, July 25, 2014










SNATCHING SIGNALS Most of the fast radio bursts seen to date have been recorded by the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.





Yury Prokopenko/Getty Images



Magazine issue: Vol. 186 No. 3, August 9, 2014







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Duncan Lorimer wasn’t looking for an eruption of radio waves from another galaxy. He and his student David Narkevic were mining old data from Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope for oddly behaving pulsars, the rapidly spinning cores of dead massive stars. Instead, they found a strange burst of radio noise recorded in 2001 that appeared to originate well beyond one of the satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.


The signal was so intense that it briefly overwhelmed the telescope. “It took me a while to come to terms with it,” says Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “I knew it was unusual, but I just wasn’t able to grasp the whole gravity of the situation.” In 2007, Lorimer wrote in Science that the burst “represents an entirely new phenomenon.”


Just one signal was a curiosity. But in 2011, astronomer Evan Keane, who was at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Manchester, England, reported a second one, also in archival data from Parkes.



The only FRB not seen at Parkes was detected with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the largest operating single dish telescope on Earth. The Arecibo discovery bolsters the idea that the signals originate in deep space.

David Parker/Science Source


Then in 2013, a team led by Dan Thornton, another Jodrell Bank astrophysicist, snagged four more in archival data from 2011 and 2012. The bursts came from points all around the sky (SN: 7/27/13, p. 8). Each one blasted out radio waves: electromagnetic waves with much lower frequencies than infrared and visible light. Named fast radio bursts, or FRBs, the observations had a few things in common:

They were bright, they were brief, and they seemed to be coming from very far away.

Thornton’s discovery set the field ablaze. The radio bursts appeared to be the calling card of some exotic, cataclysmic event outside of the Milky Way. Intriguingly, if these signals were truly racing through the space between galaxies, then they may have encountered — and be able to tell the story of — half the missing matter in the universe (see sidebar).


The more astronomers look, the more FRBs they find. Eight fast radio bursts have been reported so far, with another dozen or so yet to be published. This new cosmic mystery is the kind of thing astronomers find irresistible: an exploration of the unknown, and a reminder of how little we know about the universe.


“There’s a race on,” says Dale Frail, assistant director for the Very Large Array in Socorro, N.M., “a friendly scientific race.” Astronomers are dusting off old telescopes and refurbishing others. Radio observatories around the globe are scanning the skies to figure out what these bursts are — and where they come from.

Possible sources

Erratic pulsars

As the rapidly spinning core of a dead star ages, its steady radio pulse might become sporadic. But FRBs are much brighter than known pulsars.
Annihilating black holes

As it slowly leaks energy, a black hole may eventually vanish, possibly in a puff of radio waves. But probably too dim for an FRB.
Flaring magnetars

Highly magnetic neutron stars occasionally release pent-up energy at all frequencies of light. They’re about the right amount of energy.
Blitzars

As a spinning overweight neutron star slows, it might implode, releasing a burst of radio waves. But it may be too infrequent to cause the predicted 10,000 FRBs per day.
Colliding neutron stars

Two neutron stars spiraling together might briefly emit radio waves just before they merge, though not frequently.
Supernovas

The shockwave of an exploding star could blast out radio waves if tangled in the magnetic field of an orbiting neutron star.
Flaring stars

Some stars erupt and discharge brief bursts of radio energy. But the radio waves probably can’t escape the dense plasma surrounding these stars.
Extraterrestrials

Not likely. The signals look too much like natural phenomena to be alien-made.

“People are finding them, but they don’t know what they mean,” says Keith Bannister, an astronomer at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science in Marsfield, Australia. “There are big arguments about whether they’re real or not, whether they’re very local or very distant.” Speculation about the origin of fast radio bursts runs from the mundane to the exotic. “There are probably at least twice as many theories as there are FRBs at the moment,” Lorimer says.
Of blitzars and magnetars

With the scant data that are available, astronomers are narrowing down the possibilities. Each FRB arrives as a single pulse, which leads people to think that the bursts are probably caused by eruptions or implosions. While FRBs are powerful enough to be seen from other galaxies, they’re not as energetic as an exploding star. And they last for only a few milliseconds, so the source has to be relatively compact, roughly as wide as Texas. Keane, now at Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Australia, favors two ideas, both involving dead stars.


When a massive star explodes, its core stays behind. Within the core, a struggle ensues between the crushing force of gravity and the outward push of subatomic particles. If the core weighs more than a few suns, gravity wins, and the core collapses into a black hole. If the core is smaller, neutrons keep gravity in check, and the core survives as a neutron star.


If the core is rotating very fast, says Keane, it’s possible to be heavy and still be a neutron star. Pushing back against gravity, the rotation keeps the core stable. But everything that spins eventually slows down. When the overweight neutron star slows enough, it implodes in an event known as a blitzar. Theoretically, the collapse could generate a radio pulse that looks like an FRB.


Or the bursts could be eruptions from a magnetar, Keane says. Magnetars are neutron stars with a magnetic field around 1 million billion times as strong as Earth’s. Astronomers have seen similar bursts from magnetars in our galaxy — the brightest one hit Earth in 2004 and blinded the Swift space telescope, even though it was pointed in a different direction at the time (SN: 2/26/05, p. 132).


There are ways to tell the two apart: Magnetars repeat, blitzars do not. “You can only destroy a neutron star and make a black hole once,” says Keane. Magnetars also radiate light at much higher frequencies, such as gamma rays; blitzars, on the other hand, would probably emit only low-frequency radio light. For now, the more common magnetars seem the more likely suspect of the two.

Delayed light



In a plot (top), the “Lorimer burst” looks the way a slide whistle sounds: The high frequencies arrive first, followed by a sweep to lower frequencies. (Inset shows the light burst’s brevity, just a few milliseconds long.) Space plasma slows down low-frequency radio waves more than higher frequencies (illustrated at bottom), so they reach the telescope at different times.


Source (top): D.R. Lorimer et al/Science 2007

To figure out if blitzars or magnetars — or something else entirely — make sense, astronomers need to know how far away these bursts are. Estimates of distances depend on knowing what the light encountered on its way to Earth. As light crosses space, it plows through plasma, gas clouds where electrons roam free. How easily the light navigates around the electrons depends on the light’s frequency. High-frequency light passes through with relative ease; low frequencies take a bit longer.


If something blasts out radio waves, all the frequencies leave as a group, but they don’t arrive together at their destination. A radio telescope will see the higher radio frequencies before the lower frequencies. The result, if you could hear it, might sound like a slide whistle. The delay between arrival times indicates how much stuff the light stumbled upon on its way to Earth.
Astronomers can use the number of electrons encountered by the radio waves as a proxy for estimating the distance that the light traveled. Count up the electrons: If the light ran into more electrons than astronomers expect exist between Earth and the edge of the Milky Way, then the signal must originate outside of our galaxy. Astronomers only have theoretical calculations to estimate how many electrons should be floating about in space, but the five bursts detected by Lorimer and Thornton met far more electrons than can reasonably fit within the Milky Way.


Keane’s burst, however, is different. That FRB passed through the plane of our galaxy and shot through the Scutum star cloud, a window in the interstellar dust. The gap allowed CSIRO’s Bannister and colleagues to peer deep into the galaxy and directly measure how many electrons sit between Earth and Keane’s burst. They reported in the May 1 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that this burst most likely originated from within the Milky Way. If they’re right, then the Keane burst might be an erratic pulsar or an annihilating black hole. It may also mean that FRBs are two distinct but similar phenomena: one from our galaxy and one from farther afield.
Here or there

Then again, the bursts may not be coming from space at all.


After the first FRB was reported, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, a Caltech astrophysicist, and colleagues went digging through old Parkes data.

They found another 16 bursts that closely resemble the other FRBs with one key exception: They appeared to originate from within Earth’s atmosphere, based on the way they hit the telescope. Another group recently saw five similar bursts at the Bleien Radio Observatory near Zurich. In both cases, the bursts typically arrived late in the morning, which means these local radio blips appear to be tied to Earth’s daily rhythm. Even more so than FRBs, their origin has scientists baffled.


Burke-Spolaor named these atmospheric bursts perytons after a mythological winged elk that casts the shadow of a human, appearing as something it is not. Perytons make some astronomers hesitant about FRBs. Shri Kulkarni, also from Caltech, wonders if FRBs are just perytons that are very high in the atmosphere. An FRB beyond about 20 kilometers above Parkes, he says, may look like it came from another galaxy.


Laura Spitler’s recent detection may help. The astrophysicist from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, found a seventh FRB, reported in the August 1 Astrophysical Journal, within 2012 data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. At 305 meters across, Arecibo is the largest operating radio dish on the planet. Based on Arecibo’s enormous size, Kulkarni says this burst must be at least 400 kilometers away, about the altitude of the International Space Station and beyond the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere.


Spitler’s burst also puts to rest any concern that FRBs are a quirk of the Parkes telescope. But it doesn’t resolve the issue of whether they arise in the Milky Way or not. Like Keane’s burst, Spitler’s signal sits in the plane of the galaxy. “My thought is that we’re currently looking at three different populations,” says Burke-Spolaor: bursts within Earth’s atmosphere, within the Milky Way and in other galaxies.
Familiar territory

Sky maps

Mapping signals on the sky can offer clues about where the signals originate. Pulsars (top) concentrate in the Milky Way, because most of the ones we see sit in our galaxy. Gamma-ray bursts (middle) come from everywhere, which means they’re parked in other galaxies. Fast radio bursts (bottom) seem to mostly avoid our galgaxy, a hint that they may come from very far away.



Credits: Green Bank Telescope, West Virginia Univ; G. Fishman et al/BATSE, CGRO, NASA.; J. Carpenter, T.H. Jarrett/2MASS, R. Hurt, C. Crockett

Astronomers have been down this road before. To ferret out the true nature of FRBs, scientists just need to look at how they solved the mystery of gamma*-ray bursts.

In the 1960s, the U.S. Air Force launched a family of satellites to scrutinize the skies for gamma rays — the highest-energy, highest-frequency light — produced by illicit nuclear weapons tests. The satellites recorded 16 flashes, only none were coming from Earth and no one knew what they were. Almost three decades later, NASA launched the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory to look for more. By the end of the mission, Compton tallied about 2,700 bursts coming from every direction in the sky. Even then, astronomers still weren’t sure exactly what produced the flashes or how far the light had traveled.


Finally, in 1997, the Italian-Dutch BeppoSAX satellite detected a gamma-ray burst and hours later caught an associated X-ray flash. Within days, telescopes on the ground saw a fading glow of visible light that seemed to sit on top of a galaxy. Astronomers quickly measured the spectrum of the visible light, which they used to calculate the distance to the burst: at least 9 billion light-years from Earth.


Astronomers now know that there are at least two subsets of gamma-ray bursts: explosions of massive stars and collisions between neutron stars in other galaxies. The key to cracking the mystery was the real-time detection and rapid follow-up from telescopes at other frequencies of light, which let researchers pinpoint the galaxy where the burst originated. The same should work for FRBs, Bannister says: Quickly and accurately locate a burst “and then you hit it with as many telescopes as you can, and see what you find.”
Gearing up

Right now, the locations of FRBs in the sky are fuzzy. The bursts that Parkes sees could be coming from any one of tens of thousands of galaxies. But what it lacks in precision, Parkes makes up for in size. It’s a large telescope — 64 meters across. It can collect a lot of light and detect fainter bursts. And with 13 receivers each looking at a different patch of sky, it can cast a relatively wide net.


Keane is using Parkes for a project called SUPERB — the SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts. (“You’ve got to have a catchy acronym,” he says.) SUPERB is trying to do for FRBs what BeppoSAX did for gamma-ray bursts: quickly alert other observatories when a burst goes off. The infrastructure to do this already exists, thanks to the gamma-ray community. As soon as SUPERB sees a potential FRB, it sends an electronic alert to other telescopes, which then reposition themselves to look for a fading afterglow.


One of those telescopes is the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope, a mile-long radio antenna in Australia. Matthew Bailes, also at Swinburne, is overseeing an effort to refurbish and update the 47-year-old facility with modern electronics, including a direct fiber-optic link to Parkes. When SUPERB sees a burst, it will send a virtual and immediate heads-up to Molonglo.

The mile-long Molonglo Telescope near Canberra, Australia, is getting a technological facelift so it can take a quick follow-up scan if the Parkes telescope picks up a new burst. © Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis


A detection at two observatories separated by hundreds of kilometers, Bailes says, would be a striking confirmation of a deep space origin for FRBs. Not only would there be two eyewitness accounts, but two telescopes working together can triangulate a position much better than a single dish. Also, he hopes to win a bet with his colleague Kulkarni, who thinks fast radio bursts are not real. “It would be a lot of fun to make him pay up,” he says.

Other radio observatories also want in. Astrophysicist Casey Law of the University of California, Berkeley is hunting for FRBs with the Very Large Array — 27 radio dishes separated by up to 36 kilometers across the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. By precisely noting the arrival times of radio signals at all 27 dishes, astronomers can pinpoint a burst to a single galaxy halfway across the visible universe, Law says. Another group is searching with the Very Long Baseline Array, a facility that takes the VLA concept and extends it to 10 radio telescopes scattered from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The telescopes are virtually linked to create an antenna more than half the width of Earth. Whereas the VLA can narrow the origin of an FRB down to a specific galaxy, the VLBA might see where within that galaxy the burst came from.


Despite predicted FRB rates as high as 10,000 per day, the VLA and VLBA teams don’t expect to find many bursts — one or two at most. The VLBA, for example, can see only about a full moon’s worth of sky at one time, and it takes a lot of moons to cover the sky. But astronomers need only one event to know if a burst is coming from another galaxy.


If there are more FRBs out there, radio astronomers will find them. Many other observatories across the United States, Australia and elsewhere are gearing up to catch them as quickly as possible. Both Arecibo and West Virginia’s Green Bank Telescope are building new equipment, including high-end video game microprocessors to do the number crunching, so they can conduct their own searches. And new facilities like the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia are hunting over large swaths of sky at very low frequencies. Each telescope has its strengths and weaknesses. Some see more of the sky but can see only the brightest bursts. Others are extremely accurate but, with a narrow field of view, take a long time to find just one.


“It’s been a roller coaster for everyone,” says Burke-Spolaor, “intrigue, curiosity and also frustration.” The only way to sort out the confusion is to look, and the entire community is stepping up. “Everywhere I go,” Keane says, “people are saying, ‘Hey, I have a telescope. I’d like to help.’ ”
If current estimates are correct, an FRB goes off somewhere in the sky once every 10 seconds. We’ve just become aware because we now have the tools to see them. “It’s like there’s this incredible symphony going on above our heads,” Lorimer says, “and we just can’t quite figure it out yet.” He pauses. “But we will.”

International search for FRBs

Astronomers are combing through data from radio telescopes around the world, and they’re developing ways to try and record new fast radio bursts. Below are selected radio telescopes that are currently searching or planning to search for these distant signals.

• 
  Radio telescopes
  
• 
  Tap for details
  
• 
  Very Long Baseline Array

Weighing the universe

Bright signals coming from across the universe can help scientists probe the space between galaxies. And that might help solve a cosmological conundrum: Where is half the matter in the universe?

Astronomers use the light from quasars, illustrated here, to estimate the number of atoms in the universe. M. Kornmesser/European So. Observ./Science Source


Astronomers use light from quasars, cores of distant galaxies that blast out more radiation than normal, as one way to find hidden atoms. As the light crosses the cosmos, it passes through gas clouds. Each cloud imprints its chemical signature on the spectrum of light from the quasar. By tallying up all the atoms the light encountered on its multibillion-year journey, astronomers can estimate how much matter was floating about in the early universe.

But when astronomers look around the present universe, about half the atoms seem to have gone missing.


Astronomers think the missing matter is in the intergalactic medium, or IGM, an expanse of plasma that fills the darkness between galaxies. Unfortunately, the IGM is sparse, which makes it difficult to study. A room filled with the plasma would contain just two electrons — and nothing else. At such low densities, the plasma barely emits any light. And light is one of the few tools astronomers have for studying the universe.


Fast radio bursts may help. If they originate in other galaxies, they must pass through the IGM. By measuring a burst, says Jean-Pierre Macquart, an astrophysicist at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in Perth, Australia, you can account for every particle the light encountered en route to Earth. If astronomers can find a lot of FRBs, he adds, they might solve a problem they’ve been struggling with for years.





Citations
L. Spitler et al. Fast radio burst discovered in the Arecibo pulsar ALFA survey. arXiv:1404.2934. Posted April 13, 2014.
K.W. Bannister and G.J. Madsen. A galactic origin for the fast radio burst FRB010621. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vol. 440, May 1, 2014, p. 353.
D. Lorimer et al. A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin. Science. Vol. 318, November 2, 2007, p. 777.
E. Keane et al. Further searches for rotating radio transients in the Parkes Multi-beam Pulsar Survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vol. 401, January 11, 2010, p. 1057.
D. Thornton et al. A population of fast radio bursts at cosmological distances. Science. Vol. 341, July 5, 2013, p. 53.



Further Reading
J. Shugart. Distant radio-wave pulses spotted. Science News. Vol. 184, July 27, 2013, p. 8.
N. Drake. Weird pulsars debut at Beijing astronomy meeting. Science News Online. August 21, 2012.
R. Cowen. Big Flash: Record-breaking explosion in outer space. Science News. Vol. 167, February 26, 2005, p. 132.

[American Patriot]

In checking through, I can get to none of the actual white papers on any of this stuff. Unless I want to pay money to gain access to the sites.

So they have made it difficult for anyone to read this stuff in detail... I'm sure it's their way of securing the data against some would-be kid scientist getting access and "discovering" something before they get it.

Typical of the scientific community.

Who says actors and actresses are obsessed with themselves?

Scientists are the worst.