Scientists Discover Radio Signal Coming from Outer Space
February 24, 2020
A radio signal coming from space has been detected by scientists that repeats its signal regularly, reminding some of the late ’90s sci fi movie “Contact” starring Jodie Foster.
USA Today article Scientists detect an unexplainable radio signal from outer space that repeats every 16 days by Doyle Rice describes the signals as “short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe,” and they were “detected about once an hour for four days and then stopped, only to start up again 12 days later.”
“This cycle repeated every 16.35 days for more than a year.”
Not only is it strange that the signal is periodic, but it’s also 500,000,000 light years away! And the source location of the radio bursts is hard to pinpoint accurately since they happen only for a fraction of a second.
One of the first thoughts was, of course, aliens. But scientists think it unlikely, MIT saying, “Even a highly intelligent species would be very unlikely to produce energies like this. And there is no detectable pattern so far that would suggest there’s a sentient hand at play.”
Some have hypothesized that the source, due to the repeating pattern, could be a “celestial body” (a star, planet, moon, or asteroid) that could be either orbiting something ─ the signal stopping momentarily while the thing it’s orbiting blocks it, or it could be rotating ─ the signal stopping momentarily while the the celestial body faces away. This would be a hypotheses on why there is a certain pattern, not why or how it’s being sent.
Currently there is still no concrete answer, only some hypotheses, to what (or who, to the people who still think it’s aliens) is sending the signal, and how or why the signal is being sent. But it has been shown to be on high priority by astronomers, considering Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy’s statement: “one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy right now is the origin of short, dramatic bursts of radio light seen across the universe.”
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