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Radio wave bursts detected from roughly 3 billion light years away.

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M

Media

Member
LookAtMeGo said:
You maybe thinking of a pulsar/neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation in one direction (well 2). I dont think this is the same thing. I could be wrong though.

Edit: pulsars emit a beam as they rotate/pulse and the beam can only be observed when its pointed toward earth. Quasars shoot out a giant beam in one direction from a supermassive black hole.
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Yeah you're likely right, I'm not that knowledgeable on the subject.
 
D

Derwind

Member
HStallion said:
At 3 billion light years away even if it was somehow aliens they have been dead since before life went Multicellular on Earth.

Anyways its not aliens
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Yep, it's like a millenia old message in a bottle, even if we find it and decipher it, the sender is long dead.

Space is so damn isolating and yet beautiful all at the same time.
 
Shadow Broker

Shadow Broker

Banned
maquiladora said:
All electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light, including radio waves.
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Thanks for the correction. I could've sworn I've watch documentries which said other wise but my memory is not reliable or I misunderstood the information.



With the way our world is going now it seems we're starting to divide ourselves as a whole instead of unifying to solve the world problems and becoming one as a species. As of right now I don't think we'll make it to being a Class 1 Civilization (planetary).


The only way the human race will live and advance long enough to discover or be discovered Intelligent Alien life is by getting past all the bullshit that seperates us now as a species.

Highly unlikely.
 
P

pestul

Member
Gridlock said:
Thanks for the correction. I could've sworn I've watch
The only way the human race will live and advance long enough to discover or be discovered Intelligent Alien life is by getting past all the bullshit that seperates us now as a species.

Highly unlikely.
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Discovering or being discovered by another advanced civilization might be the only way we get past all this bullshit. Or perhaps we'll just try to destroy them too.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
To put it into perspective, when that burst left, life on Earth amounted to basically some multi-celled organisms or to put in another way, dinosaurs wouldn't be around for another ~2.75 Billion years. If we had the capability to send that kind of message back, at the very least there would no be no water on Earth due to the sun swelling up enough to raise the Earth's surface temperature above the boiling point.
 
L

LookAtMeGo

Member
This is the abstract from the journal about the Fast Radio Bursts.

We report on radio and X-ray observations of the only known repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB) source, FRB 121102. We have detected six additional radio bursts from this source: five with the Green Bank Telescope at 2 GHz, and one at 1.4 GHz with the Arecibo Observatory, for a total of 17 bursts from this source. All have dispersion measures consistent with a single value (~559 pc cm−3) that is three times the predicted maximum Galactic contribution. The 2 GHz bursts have highly variable spectra like those at 1.4 GHz, indicating that the frequency structure seen across the individual 1.4 and 2 GHz bandpasses is part of a wideband process. X-ray observations of the FRB 121102 field with the Swift and Chandra observatories show at least one possible counterpart; however, the probability of chance superposition is high. A radio imaging observation of the field with the Jansky Very Large Array at 1.6 GHz yields a 5σ upper limit of 0.3 mJy on any point-source continuum emission. This upper limit, combined with archival Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer 22 μm and IPHAS Hα surveys, rules out the presence of an intervening Galactic H ii region. We update our estimate of the FRB detection rate in the PALFA survey to be ${1.1}_{-1.0}^{+3.7}times {10}^{4}$ FRBs sky−1 day−1 (95% confidence) for peak flux density at 1.4 GHz above 300 mJy. We find that the intrinsic widths of the 12 FRB 121102 bursts from Arecibo are, on average, significantly longer than the intrinsic widths of the 13 single-component FRBs detected with the Parkes telescope.
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I wish I was smart enough to understand that.
 
Y

Yagharek

Member
LookAtMeGo said:
This is the abstract from the journal about the Fast Radio Bursts.



I wish I was smart enough to understand that.
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I think they're basically describing the bandwidth of the observations and note that the signals are from a wide bandwidth (ie not a narrow peak like a pulsar). The dispersion measure is measure of distance: interstellar media delays higher frequency signals over long distances so the higher the DM, the greater the distance.

They are also trying to resolve with interferometry (multiple telescopes) to see if they can isolate the source of the radio signals in other spectra. eg with pulsars they might also take measurements in visible, IR or xray with telescopes like Chandra to see if they can view the object/s in different ways to get an idea of the shape, structure, etc.

Jy (Jansky) is a unit for measuring the strength of a signal specific to radio astronomy. mJy is milli Jansky (10^-3 Jy).
I think a Jansky is something like 10^-26 Watts per square metre so an absolutely tiny tiny signal compared to the strength of an earth-based radio signal which might be measured in Watts or dB scales.
 
L

LookAtMeGo

Member
Yagharek said:
I think they're basically describing the bandwidth of the observations and note that the signals are from a wide bandwidth (ie not a narrow peak like a pulsar). The dispersion measure is measure of distance: interstellar media delays higher frequency signals over long distances so the higher the DM, the greater the distance.

They are also trying to resolve with interferometry (multiple telescopes) to see if they can isolate the source of the radio signals in other spectra. eg with pulsars they might also take measurements in visible, IR or xray with telescopes like Chandra to see if they can view the object/s in different ways to get an idea of the shape, structure, etc.

Jy (Jansky) is a unit for measuring the strength of a signal specific to radio astronomy. mJy is milli Jansky (10^-3 Jy).
I think a Jansky is something like 10^-26 Watts per square metre so an absolutely tiny tiny signal compared to the strength of an earth-based radio signal which might be measured in Watts or dB scales.
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This helped me understand better. Thanks.
 
The Chosen One

The Chosen One

Member
Lovely Salsa said:
Think about this

What if intelligent civilization exists only 1 per galaxy. That would mean there are 2+ trillion ETs out there ....only problem is we'll never be able to communicate with each other and/or see if the other exists
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Not only that... you're not thinking 4th dimensionally.

For example, humans have only been around for 250,000 years. And of that period, we've only been capable sending communications beyond our earth's atmosphere for about 0.0004% of that time. It's also hard to say how long will the human civilization survive. We might just be here for another 50,000 years or so before a massive Ice Age, meteor, or worldwide plague wipes out mankind.

Our time on this planet might only be about 300,000 - 500,000 year window. So if there is other intelligent life out in the galaxies, they would have to develop communication/space travel during the same window of our existence. Considering the universe is billions of years old and will be around for another billion years, add this with the size of our universe, the chances of us encountering other intelligent life during our human timeline is very minute. The longer human civilization survives, the better chance we have of encountering alien life. But humans would need to survive for hundreds of millions of years (with space communication/travel ability) to have a chance at actually encountering other intelligent alien life.

But considering how much human civilization has changed and how much we've changed the planet in just the last 100 years, it's impossible to fathom what we or the planet will look like in a million years, let let alone the next 50,000 years. Also in a normal human lifespan of 75 years, the chances of an extinction level meteor event is extremely low. But once you start talking on the scale of million years, an extinction level event is pretty much guaranteed to happen. The challenge for human civilization is to perfect space travel, so when the extinction event does happen to planet earth, we've already colonized other planets to ensure our continued survival.
 
H

HeySeuss

Member
Crazy to think that the signal came from a time that the earth was just evolving single celled organisms and developing photosynthesis.

3 billion years ago is crazy when you remember the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old.
 
D

DarkKyo

Member
The Chosen One said:
The challenge for human civilization is to perfect space travel, so when the extinction event does happen to planet earth, we've already colonized other planets to ensure our continued survival.
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If we've gotten to the point where interstellar travel is possible then it's likely our planetary defenses would be up to the challenge of annihilating potential extinction level objects from outer space.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
HeySeuss said:
Crazy to think that the signal came from a time that the earth was just evolving single celled organisms and developing photosynthesis.

3 billion years ago is crazy when you remember the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old.
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to give an idea of the scale of time involved here, that's a long ass time yo
 
Y

Yagharek

Member
LookAtMeGo said:
This helped me understand better. Thanks.
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You're welcome. If you're interested I suggest reading about people like Grote Reber and his involvement in the emerging field of radio astronomy.

Or in terms of content for research, things like masers, pulsars and interferometry (eg VLBI, and the news Square Kilometre Array) are all interesting in their own right.
 
V

Vulcano's assistant

Banned
3 billion light years is so stupidly far away that 90% of your advance civilizations from science fiction couldn't travel from there to our galaxy. All of Halo, all of the Hyperion Cantos, all of Mass Effect, all of Star Trek, all of The Culture Series, all of Star Wars take place inside a single galaxy or just barely spreads to a neighbor galaxy, this is about a thousand times that.

We could have science fiction technology to colonize the milky way, and still wouldn't even consider traveling 3 billion light years.
 
L

LookAtMeGo

Member
Yagharek said:
You're welcome. If you're interested I suggest reading about people like Grote Reber and his involvement in the emerging field of radio astronomy.

Or in terms of content for research, things like masers, pulsars and interferometry (eg VLBI, and the news Square Kilometre Array) are all interesting in their own right.
Click to expand...
Thanks. I will look this stuff up. Very interesting indeed.
 
M

Mac the KNife

Member
Syriel said:
The universe is a circle.

It's us.
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6b3nDDb.jpg
 
F

foxuzamaki

Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
I'm sure if we send a message back now it will maybe get back to us just before our sun explodes
 
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