ET calling? Telescope picks up mysterious radio signals from deep space

Scientists from Canada have discovered mysterious signals far away from outer space.

The signals were received by telescope from the CHIME observatory, located in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley in Canada. It scans the entire northern sky each day. The telescope was set up in 2018 and picked up the signals soon after it was set-up. The astronomers from the University of British Columbia the signals were coming from 1.5 billion light years away.

They also said that there were 13 fast radio bursts, known as FRBs, and more interestingly there were some among them which had very atypical repeating signals. The signals have been reported earlier albeit from a different telescope.

An astrophysicist from the university has said that the second instance of the signals being received means there could be more out there. Scientists have confirmed that the signals that have been picked up this time have the properties of the earlier ones

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In 2017, Harvard scientists have speculated that these FRBs might be leakage from planet-sized transmitters powering interstellar probes in distant galaxies.

They said that since a natural origin cannot be identified, an artificial or alien origin can be contemplated.

“Whatever the source of these radio waves is, it’s interesting to see how wide a range of frequencies it can produce. There are some models where intrinsically the source can’t produce anything below a certain frequency,” said Arun Naidu of McGill University in Canada, who was part of the team that detected the signal.

The discovery of the extragalactic signal is among the first, eagerly awaited results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a radio telescope inaugurated in 2017.

“Until now, there was only one known repeating FRB. Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out there,” said Ingrid Stairs, a member of the CHIME team.

“And with more repeaters and more sources available for study, we may be able to understand these cosmic puzzles -- where they’re from and what causes them,” said Stairs, an astrophysicist at University of British Columbia in Canada.

(With PTI inputs)

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