Signals From Another Planet?
Is it the rise of aliens?
Between 2018 and 2019, CHIME, short for Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, detected 535 extragalactic fast radio bursts—strange cosmic signals. In 2021, just in its first year of operations, the Canadian radio telescope detected four times more extragalactic fast radio bursts than used to be detected. With the CHIME having an expanded, fast radio burst (FRB), astrophysicists can now see what FRBs look like, what natural laws might be driving these events and their benefit for the understanding of the universe.
Radio signals are fascinating yet puzzling phenomena to study. Perhaps it is so because of their short burst of lights that last only milliseconds before they disappear in the blink of an eye; it can be difficult to precisely and accurately tell when one would see the next wavelength. Although discovered in 2007, there still remains a thick veil of mystery covering its face. This emerging field in astrophysics can, perhaps, explain the diffuse gas in the space we call void, which we cannot see.
Because the signals which last for milliseconds are bursts of radiation that produce a spectrum of radio waves that disperse into radio waves of higher frequencies as they pass through matter. With telescopes like CHIME, researchers can measure the dispersion to understand what missing matter is scattered in the universe. Astronomers, too, can use the same dispersion behavior of the radiation to determine how far apart matter in the universe are from each other. The outcomes of these investigations can take researchers closer to where these radio signals are coming from, albeit there are some considerations for error in the estimations resulting from the reality that matter is unevenly distributed in the universe.
Image evidence taken of repeated fast radio bursts in the sky in 2017 has revealed that these radio signals were coming from another galaxy approximately 3 billion light-years away from Earth. It’s unclear what these fast radio bursts are or the cause of these bursts, but the privilege of combining innovations in astrophysics technology (CHIME) and the peculiar manifestation of these fast radio bursts gives one hope that the mystery around these radio signals would be unraveled, theories accepted or rejected, and laws established about its true nature. 535 new fast radio bursts is big data to play around with and the expectation is that there would be loads of studies around this catalogue.
And there has been quite a handful of studies already.
One study by student members of the CHIME collaboration revealed that the FRBs detected by CHIME come equally from all directions. Another study showed that repeating events behave in a different manner from single bursts. A third study found that FRBs are strongly associated with known galaxies. What is clear here, and to reiterate again, is that the field of radio signals from another galaxy is an emerging field of astrophysics which no one can claim monopoly of knowledge. We expect to see innovations in the design of telescopes to aid the better study of these galactical matter.
