re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

Thanks my friend. Thats a good read !

(With so many scenarios on the table, I couldn’t resist asking astronomers about the option at the very edge of possibility, unlikely but also impossible to rule out: aliens. I admit that, despite knowing better, when I learned that astronomers had detected a distinct pattern emanating from outside the solar system, my mind jumped to Contact, the ’90s classic starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, a scientist obsessed with extraterrestrial life. When Li told her colleagues about the signals she saw, did they sprint from console to console in an operating room like Arroway did, scrambling to turn up the signal louder, clearer?

No, because the story with FRBs—the story with most mystifying astrophysical phenomena—is that it’s never aliens. Although, people more qualified than I am are also considering that, okay, maybe, these might, on the off chance, be alien signals: Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist known for entertaining ET explanations, this week drew a connection between Li’s FRB and a planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun. The planet takes 16 days to orbit its star, the same period observed in the FRB’s behavior, and Loeb suggested that perhaps the radio waves come from that planet, whose inhabitants have figured out how to harness and beam starlight, when their world turns our way.

But although the newly found FRB is indeed weird, it’s probably not a beacon from an advanced civilization. “This shares a lot of properties with other sorts of FRBs, which are not regular at all, so we don’t have any reason to believe that this one in particular is special,” Vikram Ravi, an astronomy professor who wasn’t involved in the research but who has discovered several FRBs, told me. )