For the past eight years, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of strange radio signals emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. And now, the mystery has deepened.
A new study shows that the so-called “fast radio bursts” follow a weirdly specific pattern — a finding that the researchers behind the study 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.”
Alien signals, really? That might sound far out, but a leading scientist in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) says we shouldn’t rule out that possibility.
“These fast radio bursts could conceivably be ‘wake up calls’ from other societies, trying to prompt a response from any intelligent life that’s outfitted with radio technology,” Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research who was not involved in the study, told The Huffington Post in an email. “On the other hand, they could also be perfectly natural, astrophysical phenomena.”
Full story on Huffington Post here.
