According to CBC, telescopes belonging to famous physicist Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Listen project to search for extraterrestrial life have discovered 15 strange signal sequences.
These signal sequences come from a radio burst source (FRB) named 121102, in a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years from Earth.
This is not the first time people have received signals from FRB 121102. However, recent signals have been transmitted at higher frequencies than before.
“It’s extremely puzzling and unlike any other FRB,” Paul Scholz, an astronomer who specializes in studying FRBs, told CBC.
Meanwhile, Mr. Andrew Siemion, Director of the Breakthrough Listen program, at the University of California at Berkeley (USA), explained: “Signals of this type have never been detected at such high frequencies.”
The Breakthrough Listen program has the goal of searching for signs of extraterrestrial life in the past.
This program, worth $100 million, was founded by Professor Stephen Hawking and Russian Internet billionaire Yuri Milner.
About 150 FRBs have been previously detected since 2012. Because they last only a few milliseconds and radio telescopes can only monitor a small area of the sky at any one time, only one of them wave sources are detected repeatedly.
Exactly 15 sound waves were recently recorded by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (USA) on Saturday, August 26, in 5 hours.
Researchers of the Breakthrough Listen program have initially analyzed the recorded data sources and only determined that they came from one source and announced it on September 2.
For comparison, it took scientists 83 hours of observation, over a six-month period in 2016, to detect just nine signal sequences coming from FRB 121102.
“Whether or not radio bursts are extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen has contributed to expanding the frontier into a rapidly growing new area of our understanding of the universe,” said Andrew Siemion. Discuss new discoveries.
Until now, people are still debating the origin of FRBs. According to CBC, it is expected that in the next few months Canada’s CHIME telescope will begin further studies of the FRB.
But these 15 sound wave signals make scientists excited because they can collectively generate the energy of 500 million suns (to be able to travel that far into space).
In general, scientists still do not know anything about these newly recorded mysterious signals. Even earlier this year, a group of scientists at America’s famous Harvard University hypothesized that those sound waves could be “an energy source for alien spaceships”.
It is worth noting that despite his desire to understand the mysteries of the universe, Professor Hawking himself was worried about finding signals from aliens.
He said that if that really happened, it would be best “not to respond immediately” to those rumors because it would be like Christophe Colomb’s conquest of the Americas.
“One day we may receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c but we need to be careful before responding. An encounter with a more advanced civilization could be like of Native Americans with Colomb and as everyone knows, it ended badly,” Professor Hawking once opined in the documentary Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places.
According to the opinion of a professor who is one of today’s top scientific geniuses, there may be alien civilizations that are more advanced than Earth’s and if they “talk to each other” the Earth will be annexed.