Did scientists just pick up the first intelligent radio waves from a distant ALIEN planet?
ASTRONOMERS have picked up five mysterious unidentified radio signals that could originate from OUTSIDE the Milky Way.
By Jon Austin
PUBLISHED: 10:53, Fri, Nov 27, 2015 | UPDATED: 15:08, Fri, Nov 27, 2015
The "fast radio bursts" included one "double signal" never heard before and have left astronomers buzzing with excitement over the possibility of it being a message with alien origins.
Only 11 of the unidentified transient radio pulses have been recorded before around the world.
And it is the curious new double blast - which was accompanied by four "singles" - which has baffled astronomers analysing data from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.
Emily Petroff from Swinburne University, in Melbourne, one of the team who discovered the signals, believes the origin could be more remarkable than anything recorded before.
She tweeted: "We have no idea what's going on, but we know it's definitely something cool.”
The discovery is being compared in significance to the recording of the "Wow signal" - a strong narrowband radio wave found by Jerry Ehman in 1977.
That radio burst, picked up by the Big Ear radio telescope of The Ohio State University in the United States, bore all the expected hallmarks of non-terrestrial origin but has not been detected since.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first discovered from records in 2007, and we finally saw one in real-time last year.
However, there has never, until now, been a double blast.
They are quick-fire bursts of radio energy, originating from great distances away, and, as a result, must have contained a huge amount of energy.
The source remains a total mystery.
Seemingly similar readings which excited astronomers earlier this year called perytons at the time were later found to be coming from microwave ovens on Earth being prematurely opened in the canteens of observatories where observations were being taken.
The announcement in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society of the five new signals has left the research community on tenet hooks.
The team said the double burst FRB (called 121002) had a "clear two-component profile".
They say each component is similar to the known population of single component FRBs and are separated by 2.4 milliseconds.
They added: “Many of the proposed models to explain FRBs use a single high energy event involving compact objects (such as neutron star mergers) and therefore cannot easily explain a two-component FRB.”
The news comes just days after a research paper claimed FRBs were the result of mergers between black holes and neutron stars.
FRB 121002 has the largest delay yet recorded of any frequency picked up, suggesting it has an origin of an immense distance away - probably several billion light-years beyond our own galaxy the Milky way.
More conventional theories for the bursts include them being created by evaporating black holes, supergiant pulsar pulses or the collapse of epically large stars.
But the team said it was difficult to match any of these with the double bast, suggesting that intelligent origin was a serious possibility.
Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, said: "Every unusual signal from outer space encourages us to wonder if it is from an alien civilisation.
"It would be fantastic if this is an alien signal as the knowledge that we are not alone in this vast universe would have a dramatic impact on our perception of our place in the scheme of things.
"It would certainly give the opportunity for UFO spotters to say we told you aliens exist and take an interest in our activities, and you didn't believe us."
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