Alien life is a reality. According to certain theories, radio pulses picked up by Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Listen experiment may indicate the presence of UFO beacons or neutron stars.
At the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, US, the Listening Project telescope is searching deep space.
15 intense, repeating radio pulses from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years distant from Earth have been discovered by astronomers hunting for signs from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Until now, no one knows where the mystery signals, known as rapid radio bursts, originate from. Some have speculated that black holes or revolving neutron stars with extraordinarily powerful magnetic fields might be the source of these mysterious phenomena. Possible alien spaceship beacons are another option.
Professor Stephen Hawking and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner founded the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100 million (£77 million) effort to detect indications of intelligent life in the cosmos.
More than a dozen radio blasts had already been observed. Radio telescopes can only examine a tiny portion of the sky at a time, therefore only one of these sources has been found to reoccur.
Known as FRB 121102, the source is located around 3bn light years away in a dwarf galaxy.
15 additional signals have been detected from the same source and at a greater frequency than the prior signals, but what this means about the source of these unexplained occurrences is still unknown.
According to Breakthrough Listen postdoctoral researcher Vishal Gajjar, who discovered the increased activity and confirmed that the source is now in a newly active state, the high resolution data obtained by the instrument will allow measurements of the properties of these mysterious bursts with greater precision than ever before.
The director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and of the Breakthrough Listen programme, Andrew Siemion, says that “whether or not fast radio bursts turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the universe around us.”
The Astronomer’s Telegram website published the results.
