Astronomers have picked up a series of mysterious signals emanating from a tiny dwarf galaxy three billion light years away – and scientists cannot rule out the possibility they were produced by an alien civilization.
Breakthrough Listen, a project dedicated to finding signs of intelligent life in the universe, has detected 15 “fast radio burst” (FRB) signals coming from a mysterious cluster of stars.
The source of the transmissions is called FRB 121102, which is referred to as a “repeater” because it keeps producing the signals.
This rules out the possibility they are produced by catastrophic one off events such as a star exploding.
However, we simply can’t explain the origin of these mysterious pulses.
In a press release, Breakthrough Listen wrote: “Attempts to understand the mechanism that generates FRBs have made this galaxy a target of ongoing monitoring campaigns by instruments across the globe.
“Possible explanations for FRBs range from outbursts from rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, to more speculative ideas that they are directed energy sources used by extraterrestrial civilizations to power spacecraft.”
If FRBs turn out to be produced by aliens, there’s very little possibility of us contacting them due to the sheer distances involved and the fact that we have picked up the pulses billions of years after they came into being.
“When the recently-detected pulses left their host galaxy our entire Solar System was just 2 billion years old,” Breakthrough Listen added.
“Life on Earth consisted of only single-celled organisms and it would be another billion years before even the simplest multicellular life began to evolve.”
Breakthrough Listen is a global astronomical initiative launched in 2015 by Internet investor and philanthropist Yuri Milner and the British physicist Stephen Hawking.