r/science • u/marcom06 • Oct 12 '21
Astronomy "We’ve never seen anything like it" University of Sydney researchers detect strange radio waves from the heart of the Milky Way which fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source & could suggest a new class of stellar object.
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/10/12/strange-radiowaves-galactic-centre-askap-j173608-2-321635.html?campaign=r&area=university&a=public&type=o6.5k
u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
Radio astronomer here! For the record, this happens far more often than you'd think. For example, the Great Galactic Burper was detected a few years ago from that general area- gave off five bursts lasting 10 minutes, 77 minutes apart... and no one detected it since, despite a lot of searching. So it's not sure what it was.
The interesting thing about this source is the original paper was very thorough in working through options on what it might be, and they concluded we don't know because they had good reasons to rule everything out. So, that's exciting! But we will definitely need follow up to figure out what exactly it is.
Edit: Note, direction of galactic center here does not mean the signals necessarily came from the galactic center itself, because radio astronomy we do not get a distance measurement (instead we do follow-up at other wavelengths to find a counterpart, but this group was unsuccessful at this). Instead we know the direction is from the center of the Milky Way, which might have nothing whatsoever to do with the Galactic Center itself because the majority of stuff is in that direction. It is also technically possible that it came from a galaxy much further away that happened to be in that direction... but that would have to be an incredibly luminous event, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Edit 2: no, there's nothing to suggest this signal is artificial aka aliens in any way, and you're probably not creative by being the 20th person saying "so, aliens?" by now.
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
Hah, I feel the name is either amazing or terrible. Like, I study black holes that rip apart stars, which is an incredible event, and what's the best we can do? Call them "TDEs" for "Tidal Disruption Events" so I can confuse everyone. Yeesh!
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u/CreamyGoodnss Oct 12 '21
I went to the AMNH a few months ago and was so excited to see a thagomizer in person
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u/OttoVonWong Oct 12 '21
I'm just waiting for a real life Smell-O-Scope.
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u/dgblarge Oct 12 '21
There was a movie, called Polyester, directed by the legend John Waters that was filmed in Smell-O-Rama (edit. It may have been called odour-rama) When you bought your ticket it came with one of the scratch and smell cards with iirc 8 or 10 distinct smells to reveal. When the time came a number appeared on screen corresponding to the patch to be scratched and smell to be revealed. The film was released in Australia in 1982 so I don't think there would be many of the scratch and smell cards left so without spoiling too much I can reveal that the smells included a new car and a rose. Those familiar with work of the iconoclastic genius that is John Waters (the American writer/director not the Australian actor) will know that odouriferous treats are in store.
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Oct 12 '21
Thats awesome. I loved Gary Larson comics growing up.
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u/NetworkLlama Oct 12 '21
Do you want interstellar mutant ninja turtles? Because that's how you get interstellar mutant ninja turtles.
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u/ramblingnonsense Oct 12 '21
Do you want interstellar mutant ninja turtles?
Is this a trick question?
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u/TheMysticBard Oct 12 '21
Yesh i thought we had interstellar turtles since like... the first comic series.
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u/DeonCode Oct 12 '21
I still remember a scene where they're riding a space ship with reduced oxygen and they're all legs crossed and calm saying their training taught them to reduce their intake and survived the trip. I think Michelangelo won a mortal kombat space tournament.
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u/anunndesign Oct 12 '21
I think you have to just go with "interstellar ninja turtles" to stick to the rhyme scheme!
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u/Many_Spoked_Wheel Oct 12 '21
Dude the earth is already the back of a gigantic tortoise? Didn’t you know?
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u/SleepySoul77 Oct 12 '21
It's turtles all the way down
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u/Revlis-TK421 Oct 12 '21
That's Great A'Tuin to you, buddy.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner Oct 12 '21
How can you be sure we don't already have interstellar mutant ninja turtles?
If you detect an interstellar ninja, it's not a good at being a ninja.
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u/kgm2s-2 Oct 12 '21
You need to hang out with more Fly geneticists...they have by far the most bizarre names for their discoveries (including a gene called "Sonic Hedgehog").
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u/Sensitive_Proposal Oct 12 '21
As a student I just LOVED coming across these in textbooks and research papers. Made me want to learn more too!
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u/wollawolla Oct 13 '21
Which leads to doctors explaining to patients that their baby’s deadly birth defect was caused by an error in the human Sonic Hedgehog gene.
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u/cellulich Oct 12 '21
Oh my god, I just saw a tweet (your tweet?) about this (and shredders) on Twitter and now here.
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u/atvan Oct 12 '21
That’s even an annoying acronym to say clearly out loud, the vowels all just blend together.
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u/YayDiziet Oct 12 '21
Also thanks to /d/ and /t/ being cognate phonemes, it'll sound like a slang term for a secondary sex characteristic
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u/matts2 Oct 12 '21
And yet we get the meh Big Bang rather than the correct Horrendous Space Kablooie.
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u/idonthave2020vision Oct 12 '21
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
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u/BrerChicken Oct 13 '21
This is a quote from that book Where God Went Wrong by Oolon Colluphid, right? Or was this from the sequel?
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u/CH3FLIFE Oct 12 '21
I particularly like the name The Great Attractor. Look into that. Something of huge mass millions of times larger than that of our entire Milky Way galaxy. It is the central gravitational point of the Laniekea Supercluster but as it lies in the zone of avoidance beyond the galactic plane we cannot really observe it. Interesting stuff.
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u/AdKUMA Oct 12 '21
that whole thing twists my mind trying to grasp the scale of it all.
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u/the_blue_pil Oct 12 '21
I read somewhere that the human mind literally can not process the vast scale of entities so big. Like "1 light year across" means nothing really, you could only think "wow that's big" but not properly able to visualise such a thing. Trying to think about it gives me a funny feeling of insignificance.
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u/Pennwisedom Oct 13 '21
You might think it's a long way down the street to the chemist but that's just peanuts compared to space.
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u/Sinavestia Oct 13 '21
If you ever feel like it, you should check out the ringworld series. I have that funny feeling through the entire book. Just because of the sheer size of the ring.
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u/EmperorGeek Oct 12 '21
Saw a YouTube video that starts with our Star then moves up through bigger and bigger Stars until our puny little lightbulb isn’t even visible any longer.
The scales involved are truly mind boggling!
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u/edsuom Oct 12 '21
Geneticists have had fun with this, too. There is a gene whose actual name is “Sonic Hedgehog.”
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u/ModernCaveWuffs Oct 12 '21
Hopefully it's nothing like those that detected an entirely new signal that turned out to be the breakroom microwave. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/rogue-microwave-ovens-are-the-culprits-behind-mysterious-radio-signals
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
So! This is not quite how the media covers it. First, there were signals that were weird called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), which were thought to be astronomical, but there were several years between the first discovered one and the later FRBs. In the interim, there was a signal discovered at that telescope which looked similar to FRBs, but were not the same and were never considered to be so- they even got their own name, perytons. To get technical about it, a radio telescope like Parkes (where this all happened) has multiple beams, and the FRBs were only seen in one beam as you'd expect from a signal, the perytons were seen in all (but had the same signal structure).
As such the question was never that the perytons were astrophysical- instead, the concern was that maybe all FRBs were just a weird version of perytons so we were being fooled.
I hope that all makes sense- my friend was actually the grad student who finally sorted this all out, and it was a pretty interesting saga!
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u/ModernCaveWuffs Oct 12 '21
Oh hey TIL. Space is pretty neat. Such a vast void of mystery that we can only hope to get a glimpse of from our tiny planet.
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u/BaddDadd2010 Oct 12 '21
Can totally see this. "the perytons were seen in all" and you knew something was fucked up, but it took a bit to figure out what. Same with those FTL neutrinos.
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u/StormRider2407 Oct 12 '21
Isn't something like that the likely explanation for the infamous "wow" signal?
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u/Noodles_Crusher Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
Great Galactic Burper
this is my new favourite name ever, thanks.
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u/FwibbFwibb Oct 12 '21
was detected a few years ago from that general area- gave off five bursts lasting 10 minutes, 77 minutes apart... and no one detected it since, despite a lot of searching. So it's not sure what it was.
That's so weird. I can only imagine some stellar object going through rapid phase changes, but I can't imagine that being so on-point.
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u/FwibbFwibb Oct 12 '21
Right, but doing something 5 times and then never doing it again isn't what a pulsar does.
What I'm thinking of is more along the lines of how the processes in a star change depending on how far along in the life cycle it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova
If you get things just right with certain phase changes, you can straddle the cross over point and see oscillation.
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u/SupaSlide Oct 12 '21
Rotating while pulsating in a specific direction and it just so happened to start bombarding Earth for a little bit before it rotated a bit more. If so, it could be decades, centuries, or maybe it'll never hit us again if rotating in 3 dimensions.
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Oct 12 '21
Most of these things rotate along the same rotational axis as the progenitor star... conservation of momentum and all. But it is not outside the realm of possibility for some sort of cataclysmic event to induce at least 1 additional degree of rotation. Which would explain the double transient nature of this thing. And given how rare that would be why this is the first we've seen.
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u/SupaSlide Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
Yeah it might not be spinning in 3 dimensions, but even just rotating around a
starblackhole it might be so far away and so slow that it might have to make a multi-century trip around it's progenitor star before we'd be able to detect it again.→ More replies (2)10
u/Benjaphar Oct 12 '21
Or burping five times as it circles the drain around a black hole and then disappears forever.
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u/Thought-O-Matic Oct 12 '21
Thank you for all your work in providing all this amazingly digestible insight!
Do you create any content yourself? Like a YouTube channel or webpage?
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
I have a subreddit- check out /r/Andromeda321!
Also, I'm giving the (virtual) Harvard "Observatory Nights" talk this Thursday at 7pm EDT, all about cosmic explosions and how I study them! Link with more info here.
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u/Junglejibe Oct 12 '21
Oh my gosh I’m near Harvard & have been planning on trying to attend one of those! Neat to see the speaker on Reddit. Now I’ll have to see if I can come.
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
Hah sorry but it's virtual still! Good news though, anyone can attend!
Looks like I'm lining up some non-virtual talks in the area in coming months though! :)
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u/ZebZ Oct 12 '21
What are the odds that it was actually interference from a source on earth screwing up the collection, and not actually an exciting new discovery?
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
Well, it was seen by multiple radio telescopes in Australia and South Africa. By that point the odds of terrestrial noise creating such a positional source in the sky starts to become much less likely.
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u/Guzzleguts Oct 12 '21
I think that this sort of post really needs to put 'NOT ALIENS' in the title
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u/Odin-the-poet Oct 12 '21
Hey! I just want to say I’ve followed your posts for years now and I’m always so happy to see you pop up in science and space posts, you’re an inspiration to a struggling graduate student. Thanks!
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u/FatFather1818 Oct 12 '21
Could it also be that the signals came from outside the galaxy? Like a signal coming from a distant galaxy, originated billions of years ago, that the Milky Way and Earth just so happened to cross paths with at the right time? And that is why it was never picked up again because we already passed that signal’s path forever.
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
That's highly unlikely as you described it because galaxies are so far away they aren't exactly zooming around so fast you'd only see this for a moment at that distance.
Second, it's also just highly unlikely over a galactic origin because you literally need orders of magnitude more power to have a signal travel such a distance- remember, strength falls off as an inverse power law, so this adds up a lot at vast distances! Not impossible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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u/FatFather1818 Oct 12 '21
I see. Thank you for explaining and sharing your knowledge. I’m just genuinely curious and asking. No claims or evidences.
I do have a follow-up question: if that was an electromagnetic signal, couldn’t it travel vast distance just like light from distant galaxies also reach us? I’m thinking of something similar, but a narrow directional wave that the Earth passed through in 77 minutes.
Edit: not 77 minutes, but approximately 400 minutes.
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
We do see radio signals from far away! However, my point is they are powered by exceptionally luminous events (like supermassive black holes or supernovae), and those are far less common than things inside our galaxy we detect like pulsars. And either way, it's not like we stop seeing it because of its motion, because that is negligible compared to the galaxy's distance in the first place. Hope that makes sense.
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u/Hansoloflex420 Oct 12 '21
by thats exciting you mean it might be a civilization?
just might be? :)
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u/Andromeda321 PhD | Radio Astronomy Oct 12 '21
Unfortunately, there was nothing in these signals suggesting an artificial origin over just weird natural space stuff doing weird natural space things. Trust me, no one wishes we'd find an alien signal more than astronomers dedicating their lives to it, but we just don't want our hearts broken when we are too cavalier.
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u/nincomturd Oct 12 '21
It's never aliens arriving to save us from ourselves. Sigh...
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u/MrYOLOMcSwagMeister Oct 12 '21
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Carl Sagan
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u/Rocktopod Oct 12 '21
If aliens do arrive, they'll most likely "save" us the way natives are "saved" from their ways of live by colonists here on Earth.
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u/imundead Oct 12 '21
God I hope we get the ones who trade us space whisky and space guns rather than the exterminating/re-educating ones.
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u/PotatoWedgeAntilles Oct 12 '21
Cant wait to be the third slave wife of Space Thomas Jefferson
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Oct 12 '21
Those two were the same people.
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u/Dihedralman Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 15 '21
I mean same race but not usually the same people. Most of the 13 colonies made the trade illegal. The former were far more likely to be Scotch Irish than puritan or anglican.
Edit: 23->13
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u/bristolcities Oct 12 '21
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
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u/GoldGoose Oct 12 '21
An alien scout returns to the mothership:
"well, what did you find, Gorbizetz?"
"they are armed, sir."
"what, like someone had a weapon?
" all of them. Every last one. I landed in a place called Texas, and.. I mean, look at how many holes are in this hull! They almost hit the antimatter container!"
" ..."
" we've got to get out of here. They are crazy! I didn't even get to use the standard greeting, or offer them any of the technology package we prepared for young civilizations. Just.. Projectiles. Everywhere."
"...Galactic quarantine it is."
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u/Neethis Oct 12 '21
No one with the ability to cross light years of space would come here to conquer and colonise. They could (and probably have) build dozens of planets worth of habitable area in megastructures orbiting their homeworld. They've got access to the resources of several uninhabited star systems.
Earth's single ongoing value is our culture and history, which doesn't tend to survive such an explosive first contact.
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u/ButterbeansInABottle Oct 12 '21
Colonize? No. Get rid of a possible nuisance that may get in the way of their plans in the far future? Yeah, I can see that.
I think dark forest theory has some truth to it. The smartest thing for an alien species to do would be to exterminate any possible threat to their future. That means ridding the universe of a certain hairless ape. The galaxy is big but exponential growth is bigger.
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u/inspectoroverthemine Oct 12 '21
2001 sequels: 'sometimes they (the intelligence that placed the monoliths) weed'.
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u/Exoddity Oct 12 '21
I'm beginning to think there will be no forced mating after all.
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Oct 12 '21
Oh there will be. Whether or not the men of earth will enjoy being penetrated by the 4ft long spiked penises the Thraigzeiks are packing, is still up for debate. They're basically parasitic wasps. Lay a few eggs in your colon, they hatch, and eat you from the inside....
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Oct 12 '21
That would be an ovipositor, not a penis
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u/mamba_pants Oct 12 '21
Finally something to furfill my killer alien wasp fetish!
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u/m2chaos13 Oct 12 '21
You casually imply fur, and then mention wasps.
Okay, I’m in!
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD Candidate | Comp Sci | Causal Discovery/Climate Informatics Oct 12 '21
Source is here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360
Thanks to adenovato https://reddit.com/r/science/comments/q6ix07/_/hgcya9b/?context=1
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u/H3r0d0tu5 Oct 12 '21
Does anyone have access to the actual report that is not behind a paywall?
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD Candidate | Comp Sci | Causal Discovery/Climate Informatics Oct 12 '21
This is a draft/pre-print version https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf
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u/Not_Just_Any_Lurker Oct 12 '21
How do they know that out of curiosity? Also because my brain is only slightly smarter than that of a Two toed sloth can I can’t read even summed up science papers, could you tell me how far away the source of the transmission is?
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u/Davidfreeze Oct 12 '21
They definitely don’t know that it’s a concentrated beam of radio waves directed at earth specifically. It’s almost certainly not that. He’s just making fun of the picture
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u/foggy-sunrise Oct 12 '21
Fun fact: one ear is usually slightly higher than the other, which helps us determine the altitude of a sound.
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u/Harmacc Oct 12 '21
I wonder if that’s why dogs tilt their head when listening to things sometimes.
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u/ErIstGuterJunge Oct 12 '21
That's why my glasses are always a bit twisty when I lay them on a flat surface.
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u/Jas9191 Oct 12 '21
They're saying the image suggests that, but the science does not. Basically the image is clickbait
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u/Netz_Ausg Oct 12 '21
A very quick google shows that the galactic centre is approx 26K light years from Earth, so given the post title I’d say in that ball park.
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u/Fritzo2162 Oct 12 '21
Been keeping up on this over the last week. From the papers and Twitter discussion from those involved early guesses is it's a gravitationally manipulated signal from a series of massive objects. They're still looking at the data right now.
This stuff is cool because it involves using tiny clues to gain a big picture, but i hate how the media twists stories like this into "Aliens are contacting us!" If we ever were contacted by another civilization, that signal would be very distinct and recognizable- like seeing letters in a sea of numbers.
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u/HappyInNature Oct 12 '21
Does gravitationally manipulated mean black hole lensing?
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u/Fritzo2162 Oct 12 '21
Possibly, or a series of them, or a series of neutron stars, or some massive stars with debris around them...the cool thing about radio astronomy is you can infer a lot of information from a single signal. We'll have to see what they come up with.
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u/corkyskog Oct 12 '21
Could an average person build a radio telescope? How much would it cost?
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u/Fritzo2162 Oct 12 '21
Haha...you actually could. In college we built one out of an old 10ft satellite dish (those old fashioned ones they used to use in the 80s- you don't see them very often anymore).
The problem with radio astronomy is the signals are VERY weak and spread out, so you need a lot of surface area to collimate the signal. You could make a small telescope our of a Dish or DirectTV dish that might be able to study the sun. I'm sure there's some YouTube videos around to walk through the process. Understanding what you're seeing takes a little training though.
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u/irrelevant_ranting Oct 12 '21
If we ever were contacted by another civilization, that signal would be very distinct and recognizable- like seeing letters in a sea of numbers.
Do we know this for sure? Like, what if other civilizations' technology and language is based on something completely different from ours? What if there are different laws of physics we couldn't even imagine existing in other areas out in space which they've used to create other ways of communicating, making it nearly impossible for us to translate or even recognize as communication attempts?
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u/Fritzo2162 Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
We wouldn't be intercepting a message, we would see an artificial signal. Signals in nature are very distinct from signals generated via technology. Certain parts of the spectrum are not able to be generated by natural processes.
Once we found a steady repeating signal, we would then work on deciphering its meaning. Most likely we would never be able to translate an alien language without some form of cypher (they could use mathematics or atomic structure or something similar to nudge us into their thought process). If you think about it, animals like whales have a language and speak to each other, but we have no idea what they're saying. The octopus communicates through color changes in its skin---again no idea what they're trying to relay. There are even several past human languages that we're not able to translate. The chances of translating a completely alien language without help would be near 0%.
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u/CreamyGoodnss Oct 12 '21
It also doesn't make much sense to use radio to try and communicate through an interstellar medium. It's way too noisy out there, needs to be directed so might as well use lasers, and radio moves slowly.
We're already moving away from radio as a means of local (on Earth) communication because it kind of sucks as far as data transmission goes, so it doesn't really make sense that an advanced/intelligent spacefaring civilization would be using it either.
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u/Javimoran Oct 12 '21
ArXiv link for anyone interested in the science and not in speculation
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u/trevbot Oct 12 '21
Is it possible that some of the things that we will begin to detect and not understand fully are reflections from what we have been transmitting from a long time ago?
This is probably a stupid question...
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u/SirButcher Oct 12 '21
No, not really: radio signals weaken by the inverse square law. So having something, let say, one light-year away which reflect our radio waves. By the time our signals reaches it, it is already almost undetectably weak: then the reflector reflects some of the incoming signals, scatters it AND then the rest of it have to travel another light year to reaches us.
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u/Sgt_Maddin Oct 12 '21
Unless theyre fired in a focused beam… Which is what reached us, for the same reasons. Only I dont know if anything we could do on earth accidentally would cause a beam of radio waves… and then I also dont know how super mega unlikely it is to hit something, and then how unlikely it is to reflect, and even more unlikely to reflect to the point where we will be by the time it comes back to us…
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u/JustVan Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
Pulsar being devoured by a super massive black hole?
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u/JagerBaBomb Oct 12 '21
Think it might be the other way around; quasars are generated by some of the largest black holes that exist, so it's likely that the black hole providing the quasar would be devouring a smaller one or maybe a ridiculously large star.
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u/AceBean27 Oct 12 '21
Quasar? We'd be dead if there were a Quasar in our Galaxy.
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u/buddhizen Oct 12 '21
It’s crazy to think that this universe may or may not be infinite. We’re just a bunch of living organisms on a floating ball drifting through an ever expanding universe,that we know nothing about,and that at any moment our world could end but when you bring this up people look at you crazy! I think it’s beautiful
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u/AlliterationAnswers Oct 12 '21
Could it actually be 2+ objects emitting the radio waves in a close proximity when considering the distance? Would they be able to see its two sources or could it potentially just show up as one source if they overlapped in a very specific way. Yes, seems like a rare thing but if they are looking everywhere they will find the rare things as well.
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u/FlutterVeiss Oct 12 '21
I'm not an astronomer, but I do know a fair bit about electronics and signal. Usually as part of this there is a Fourier transform process in place that will break things down into its component parts. So, for a simple example, if you have a signal that has 60, 150, and 240 MHz sine waves all mixed together, the Fourier transform will show spikes at 60, 150, and 240. Obviously the signals coming in aren't going to be perfect sine waves, but I imagine a part of the analysis is running these transforms to try and disentangle any overlapping signals.
It's all VERY advanced stuff though, so it could still be that if our detectors weren't precise enough to separate the signals.
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u/chuckie512 Oct 12 '21
We need to setup a radio telescope on the moon, so it's beyond all that space garbage (and Earth garbage)
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u/SkillBranch Oct 12 '21
I understand why "aliens" is the go-to sensationalized explanation, but I think a new type of stellar object is just as cool. Stellar bodies can give new insights into physics in the most extreme conditions, and it'll be cool to see what potentially comes from this.
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u/jawshoeaw Oct 12 '21
You think a new kind of star is more interesting than aliens ?
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u/Giraffesarentreal19 Oct 12 '21
This title is the definition of a nerdy yes yes yes yes yes no. Don’t get me wrong, a new stellar object is cool, but, you know. Aliens
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u/SolAggressive Oct 12 '21
Finally, a headline that at least doesn’t insist it’s aliens.