Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

One of paper authors here. I&#x27;ll try and answer some of the questions in the comments.<p>It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.

Since it hasn&#x27;t come up yet: whenever a new astronomical phenomenon is detected, people think &quot;Aliens!&quot; as the reason.<p>In fact, when the first pulsar was discovered, it was (somewhat jokingly) called LGM-1 for &quot;little green men&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m sure the news hype cycle will come up with similar ideas this time, and I&#x27;m just as sure that we&#x27;ll find a perfectly reasonable explanation not involving intelligent, extraterrestrial life forms.

If it&#x27;s periodic, it&#x27;s something orbiting something.<p>If it&#x27;s powerful enough to be seen 500 million ly away, one of the two orbiting objects is going to be a black hole.

arxiv Jan 28 paper &quot;Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source&quot; [1] via Feb 7 Vice article [2] and Wikipedia &quot;Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)&quot; page [3].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2001.10275" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2001.10275</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;wxexwz&#x2F;something-in-deep-space-is-sending-signals-to-earth-in-steady-16-day-cycles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;wxexwz&#x2F;something-in-deep-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Canadian_Hydrogen_Intensity_Mapping_Experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Canadian_Hydrogen_Intensity_Ma...</a>

They didn’t mention a simpler solution: random emitter orbits behind something &#x2F; Is occluded for the silent period?

&gt; For the most part, these detections were one-offs, flashing briefly before disappearing entirely.<p>I realize there is most likely an explanation that doesn’t require intelligent alien life, but that screams Dark Forest Theory.

My first thought was that this sounds like a pulsar, and I was surprised to not see that among the list of possible phenomenon. After looking it up, I still wasn&#x27;t quite sure why these couldn&#x27;t be pulsars. Is it because the period is much higher than typical pulsars?

Earth has had life for more maybe as long as 4 billion years, and in all that time there has been less than 200 years when a species had the intelligence, the motivation, and the technological advancement to send communications into space.<p>I know the odds of this being life are (literally) astronomically low, but every time I hear news like this, I can&#x27;t help hoping there&#x27;s another species out there that found the will &amp; the way to reach out.

Isn&#x27;t it strange that the periods mentioned are integer multiples of <i>days</i>?<p>Don&#x27;t known much about astronomy, but day as a unit of time is just a constant specific to our particular solar system. I guess a function of the sizes of the sun and the planets here. There should be nothing special about it. To think that 500M light years away there is something that has similar time proportions to be observed here as periodic is amazing by itself.

If aliens did exist, they would probably compress their communications. And they might use a fault tolerant infrastructure like TCP&#x2F;IP. In either scenario, real communications would not be periodic but closer to random noise. Has anyone performed a Zipf plot or calculated shannon entropy of non-periodic radio signals?

The data for this discovery as well as other work from CHIME&#x2F;FRB is available here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chime-frb-open-data.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chime-frb-open-data.github.io&#x2F;</a>

<i>&gt; This new FRB source, which the team has catalogued as FRB 180916.J0158+65, is the first to produce a periodic, or cyclical pattern of fast radio bursts. The pattern begins with a noisy, four-day window, during which the source emits random bursts of radio waves, followed by a 12-day period of radio silence. The astronomers observed that this 16-day pattern of fast radio bursts reoccurred consistently over 500 days of observations.</i><p>I wonder how these aliens manage to work only for 4 days and then rest for almost 2 whole weeks. They must be quite advanced.

It seems to me there’s no limit to what we can learn by observing outer space.

&gt;500 million light years away<p>How are they able to know how far it&#x27;s coming from?

Let&#x27;s run wild some imagination. So 500 million light years as distance, meaning it started at least 500 millions years ago. Dinosaurs weren&#x27;t existing back then. Imagine a civilization which has this energy output that is detected 500 million light years away. Wasn&#x27;t some quote where a type 4 civilization technology is indistinguishable from natural phenomenons?

Shouldn&#x27;t they be able to discriminate the type of object (single star with orbiting planets that obstruct radio waves, or dual star plus planets where the emitter itself also moves around an orbit) by analyzing the received carrier frequency and see if it&#x27;s also modulated by a much lower frequency (Doppler effect) compatible with orbital motion?

If it’s regular like clockwork it’s nothing but a cog in the universe we’re looking at, all in all interesting to study. Next irregular signal will be even more interesting though that does not necessarily imply alien communication

Does it sound like this? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NCkbekhUdw4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NCkbekhUdw4</a><p>Yes, you know what it is. :D

FRBs seem to make the front page of hn on a repeating cycle too lol

Sad we won&#x27;t be able to visit for a least 450 million years. Nice of Canada to give us all that juicy data.

“It’s like clockwork”. Probably a natural source then

Another day, another periodic pulse detected

Get Jodie Foster in here.

Probably just some aliens from some advanced civilization Far far away.

The search for aliens within aliens just insane. They&#x27;ve communicated with us for years. The idea itself a communication. It&#x27;s matter of time until we get more civilized.

Didn&#x27;t read the whole thread just yet. but, to the point.<p>So, it&#x27;s aliens. what would they possible be communicating?<p>What kind of information would actually matter to communicate over 500 million light years?<p>I bet it would be: a way to reply<p>I wouldn&#x27;t bother to try to send intructions for them - us - to build another 500 million light-year capable transmitter,<p>But maybe, just maybe, they could be sending information for making us able to build a wormhole.<p>A we&#x27;d know where the other extreme would be located, so we &quot;just&quot; need to build one and point it to them.