Extraterrestrial Neighbors? Study Says Blast Of Unknown Radio Waves Came From Outside Our Galaxy

Excerpt from 
npr.org 

On a graph, they look like detonations. Scientists call them “fast

radio bursts,” or FRBs, mysterious and strong pulses of radio waves that

seemingly emanate far from the Milky Way.
The bursts are rare;

they normally last for only about 1 millisecond. In a first,

researchers in Australia say they’ve observed one in real time.
NPR’s Joe Palca reports:

The first of these cosmic outbursts was detected fairly recently, in 2007. Last year, a radio telescope in Puerto Rico detected the same brief and powerful waves the Parke facility had earlier reported.
Calling

fast radio bursts “tantalizing mysteries of the radio sky,” the more

than 30 researchers who took part in the study say they found last May’s

FRB “during a campaign to re-observe known FRB fields.”
But

while the scientists note that the recent FRB was detected close to a

previously discovered phenomenon, they concluded that the two are

“distinct objects.”
“This is a major breakthrough,” Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University tells New Scientist. Lorimer was part of the team that uncovered the 2007 signal. He also argued that it came from far beyond our galaxy.
Astronomers have disagreed about where FRBs come from, with ideas ranging from black hole activity to solar flares.
EarthSky

reports, “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.”
Led by Emily Petroff of Australia’s Swinburne

University of Technology, scientists from the U.S., India, Germany and

elsewhere collected data on the FRB’s polarized radiation that they

believe is intrinsic to the phenomenon.
In the conclusion to their report, the scientists note, “The true progenitors of FRBs remain unknown.”
As

NPR’s Joe Palca noted last year, the study of FRBs has itself been

somewhat polarizing, in one instance resulting in “a theoretical paper

suggesting the bursts could be generated by intelligent beings

intentionally beaming a radio signal directly at Earth.”
We’ll

note that “real time” is an especially relative term when observing

events that took place billions of light-years from Earth. Noting that

detail, one of the study’s co-authors adds that the radiation’s delay as

it travels through space is the same as other phenomena that might help

to explain it…

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Extraterrestrial Neighbors? Study Says Blast Of Unknown Radio Waves Came From Outside Our Galaxy