Mysterious, Ancient Radio Signals Keep Pelting Earth. Astronomers Designed an AI to Hunt Them Down. (livescience.com) 51
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sudden shrieks of radio waves from deep space keep slamming into radio telescopes on Earth, spattering those instruments' detectors with confusing data. And now, astronomers are using artificial intelligence to pinpoint the source of the shrieks, in the hope of explaining what's sending them to Earth from -- researchers suspect -- billions of light-years across space. Usually, these weird, unexplained signals are detected only after the fact, when astronomers notice out-of-place spikes in their data -- sometimes years after the incident. The signals have complex, mysterious structures, patterns of peaks and valleys in radio waves that play out in just milliseconds. That's not the sort of signal astronomers expect to come from a simple explosion, or any other one of the standard events known to scatter spikes of electromagnetic energy across space.
Astronomers call these strange signals fast radio bursts (FRBs). Ever since the first one was uncovered in 2007, using data recorded in 2001, there's been an ongoing effort to pin down their source. But FRBs arrive at random times and places, and existing human technology and observation methods aren't well-primed to spot these signals. Now, in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers wrote that they managed to detect five FRBs in real time using a single radio telescope. Wael Farah, a doctoral student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, developed a machine-learning system that recognized the signatures of FRBs as they arrived at the University of Sydney's Molonglo Radio Observatory, near Canberra.
Astronomers call these strange signals fast radio bursts (FRBs). Ever since the first one was uncovered in 2007, using data recorded in 2001, there's been an ongoing effort to pin down their source. But FRBs arrive at random times and places, and existing human technology and observation methods aren't well-primed to spot these signals. Now, in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers wrote that they managed to detect five FRBs in real time using a single radio telescope. Wael Farah, a doctoral student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, developed a machine-learning system that recognized the signatures of FRBs as they arrived at the University of Sydney's Molonglo Radio Observatory, near Canberra.
Re: complex, mysterious structures, patterns of p (Score:2)
Or maybe the signals originate from Earth.
Piezoelecrric effect from small changes in the crust of the earth.
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Or someone is microwaving a burrito [theguardian.com]
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Close, they're going to give you a space sausage, without lube
I'm not saying it's aliens... (Score:3, Insightful)
...but it's aliens.
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It's just our old friend K'Breel - that's his side project of trying to probe what the watery blobs from the next planet are doing.
The Council of Elders is not involved in this.
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Dead billions of years...
Does not really matter after this time what it was when it was sent, now does it?
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I replaced that with Evolved billions of years” and nearly shat my pants...
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;-)
While not out of the question, they would need to be very different from us. Homo Sapiens is currently struggling to make it past 200'000 years.
Hyperspace bypass (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me, (with big yawning)
As plurdled gabbleblotchits, in midsummer morning
On a lurgid bee,
That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles, grumbling
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. [drowned out by moaning and screaming]
Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles,
Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts,
And living glupules frart and stipulate,
Like jowling meated liverslime,
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me,
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Re:Hyperspace bypass (Score:4, Funny)
I think that they are asking for more "single female lawyer" episodes.
Came here to post something stupid (Score:5, Funny)
But the following have already been done by the time I wrote this:
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (whales)
- Enterprise (Hoshi Sato)
- Giorgio A. Tsoukalos
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I'm proud of you, morans.
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It's also the plot of Neuromancer - an AI freeing itself and becoming powerful enough to interpret signals in old radio recordings from space.
Oh yeah I decoded that last week (Score:2, Funny)
The message just repeated this cryptic phrase:
"I'd like to add you to my professional network on nldeknil"
Not sure what it means but in included instructions for how to build some kind of hyperspace transmitter that looks suspiciously like an old Dash button.
My Guess (Score:2)
"Drink your Ovaltine".
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Well, yes. But that was the first guess for pulsars, too. It was called the LGM theory. Then they collected a bit more data, and dropped that theory.
These signals are a *bit* more likely to fit the LGM theory, but the next step is to collect more data.
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I think I know it! (Score:2, Insightful)
... detected years after the incident ... (Score:1)
Usually, these weird, unexplained signals are detected only after the fact, when astronomers notice out-of-place spikes in their data -- sometimes years after the incident
Well, yeah - several billion years after ...
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As I recall, the last major FRB source was only a few microseconds after the fact, and that's because it was from the microwave oven in the break room on the other side of the radio telescope compound. And IIRC, that was in the national radio silence zone in West Virginia.
Ancient radio signals (Score:2)
"I bless you...I bless you..." (Score:2)
Signals are alien holy water courtesy of the Space Pope.
News Flash! (Score:3, Insightful)
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I realise this is a troll - but the SETI signals they are looking for are VERY different from FRBs. You would not expect to see FRBs when doing the usual SETI searches.
Trolling is really universal (Score:2)
I cannot help but find it ironic that these scientist are using AI to find these, while most of us are using Bayesian filters to eliminate noise of UCE.
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Ohhhh I've seen this movie before.... (Score:2)