Scientists may have found proof that E.T. really is phoning home — in the form of powerful radio signals, which have been detected repeatedly in the same exact location in space.
Astronomy experts with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have discovered six new fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from a region far beyond our Milky Way galaxy, according to a recent report in the Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery — made in the direction of the constellation Auriga — is significant considering the fact that at least 17 FRBs have now been detected in this area. It is also the only known instance in which these signals have been found twice in the same location in space.
The region where the signals are coming from, dubbed FRB 121102 by scientists, is about 3 billion light years away from Earth.
Five of the recently found FRBs were detected with the Green Bank Telescope, while the other was recorded by the Arecibo Observatory, “for a total of 17 bursts from this source,” the report says.
The signals were also found earlier this year and in 2012.
According to experts, the FRBs could be the result of two things: solar flares from a neutron star or extra-terrestrials. But it’s still too early to tell.
“Whether FRB 121102 is a unique object in the currently known sample of FRBs, or all FRBs are capable of repeating, its characterization is extremely important to understanding fast extragalactic radio transients,” the scientists write in their report.
In 2015, physicist John Learned, with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Michael Hippke, with the Institute for Data Analysis, published a research paper arguing that repeating FRB waves had a 1 in 2,000 chance of being coincidental.
They claimed the radio bursts either came from a man-made spy satellite or a super-dense star, which would regularly emit bursts of radio waves.
Earlier this year, a team of astronomers from Laval University in Quebec published a report saying they had detected strange signals in a small cluster of stars.
Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the pair analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million different stars and discovered at least 234 that were producing the signals.
“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal,” wrote Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier. “Although unlikely … there is also a possibility that the signals are due to highly peculiar chemical compositions in a small fraction of galactic halo stars.”