Researchers speculate that a mysterious celestial body is sending signals to Earth at regular intervals, raising questions about extraterrestrial contact.
Original Title: Scientists from Australia are currently engrossed in the task of deciphering & analyzing the perplexing messages & signals received from space. They strongly believe the transmissions may be an attempt by ET to initiate communication with our species.
That article is absolute trash. It’s a pulsar. There are no “perplexing messages”. They don’t “strongly believe” that it’s aliens or any deliberate communication at all.
The article is just making stuff up.
If you go to the source of the story, The Mirror (the fucking Mirror!), despite the misleading sensationalism, even that points out that the scientisits ruled out artificial sources within hours of its discovery, concluding it is a neutron star or white dwarf.
You really have to do a shit job at reporting to do worse than the Mirror!
Yeah, but also no. This was reported last year, and the scientists studying it did not mention it was an attempt to contact us from another planet, but the “remains of a massive star’s death.”
Flaring space objects that appear to turn on and off are known as transients.
"When studying transients, you’re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind,” said study coauthor Gemma Anderson, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist, in a statement. “‘Slow transients’ – like supernovae – might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months. ‘Fast transients’ – like a type of neutron star called a pulsar – flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.”
This new, incredibly bright object, however, only turned on for about a minute every 18 minutes. The researchers said their observations might match up with the definition of an ultra-long period magnetar. Magnetars usually flare by the second, but this object takes longer.
“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker said. “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
The researchers will continue to monitor the object to see whether it turns back on, and in the meantime, they are searching for evidence of other similar objects.
“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.
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This is sensationalist reporting of ordinary scientific research.
OK, we can stop taking this seriously right there. The article cites one of Britain’s crappiest tabloids as its source.
It’s probably a Quasar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
IIRC, some (or most) emit radio waves periodically as well. Cool find, none-the-less.
Until 1932 when Radio Telescopes were invented and these phenomenons have been being observed ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Telescopes#Early_radio_telescopes
Just because you don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it’s aliens.
That article is absolute trash. It’s a pulsar. There are no “perplexing messages”. They don’t “strongly believe” that it’s aliens or any deliberate communication at all.
The article is just making stuff up.
If you go to the source of the story, The Mirror (the fucking Mirror!), despite the misleading sensationalism, even that points out that the scientisits ruled out artificial sources within hours of its discovery, concluding it is a neutron star or white dwarf.
You really have to do a shit job at reporting to do worse than the Mirror!
At least it’s not just someone running the microwave in the observatory kitchen again…
Yeah, but also no. This was reported last year, and the scientists studying it did not mention it was an attempt to contact us from another planet, but the “remains of a massive star’s death.”
From this article on CNN:
Flaring space objects that appear to turn on and off are known as transients.
"When studying transients, you’re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind,” said study coauthor Gemma Anderson, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist, in a statement. “‘Slow transients’ – like supernovae – might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months. ‘Fast transients’ – like a type of neutron star called a pulsar – flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.”
This new, incredibly bright object, however, only turned on for about a minute every 18 minutes. The researchers said their observations might match up with the definition of an ultra-long period magnetar. Magnetars usually flare by the second, but this object takes longer.
“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker said. “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
The researchers will continue to monitor the object to see whether it turns back on, and in the meantime, they are searching for evidence of other similar objects.
“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.
Seems we’re still a ways off from a three-body problem