A recent analysis of mysterious radio pulses from space sparked renewed debate about whether Earth holds a monopoly on intelligent life.
Online news aggregators, forums and popular science sites lit up this week following the March 30 publication of the study “Discrete steps in dispersion measures of fast radio bursts,” with many claiming the scientific paper appeared to show evidence that man is not alone in the universe.
However, University of Hawaii at Manoa physics professor John Learned, who co-authored the study, says that while the possibility of the pulses being alien in origin is exciting, his money is riding on other scientists providing in the coming weeks new data that could offer a more simple explanation.
“You know, it’s great fun to think about. Everybody would love to see us finding something like that,” he said of proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. “It would be the greatest discovery in history. It’s sorely tempting. … What I’ve been telling people is, we have to take the Sherlock Holmes approach, and only after we’ve eliminated all the other possibilities can you consider something this wild.”
The paper in question — co-authored by scientists Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis and Wilfred F. Domainko at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Kernphysik, both in Germany — analyzes data gathered on the relatively rare phenomenon of fast radio bursts, or FRBs, which have only been reported by scientists 11 times since 2001.
Lasting only milliseconds, the bright bursts exhibit large “dispersion measures,” a comparison of the timing of the arrival of the bursts’ higher radio frequencies on Earth versus the arrival of their lower frequencies. Higher frequencies travel faster than lower frequencies through the medium of space, and by analyzing their dispersion, scientists can estimate the distance the bursts have traveled.
FRBs have large dispersion measures, suggesting they traveled here from billions of light years away, although Learned said that theory could prove to be wrong.
What makes the FRBs particularly noteworthy, and most interesting to people outside the astronomy community, is the fact their dispersion measures appear to be following a mathematical pattern — in multiples of the number 187.5.
“The dispersion measure seems to be quantized,” Learned said. “It’s certainly very peculiar in nature.”
That realization opens the door for speculation about aliens, he agreed, but it also raises a question about the signals originating from a source much closer to home.
“It could be that there is some association with the phases of the moon when we observe,” he said. “That could be observational bias from when the telescopes were taking data. I have to be very careful about that. If indeed it does involve the moon, somehow, it could be we’re seeing bounces from off of the moon.”
Another finding that could dispel the alien theory is the fact that the times when the phenomenon of fast radio bursts is observed “seem to be clustered near the universal time code,” he said. In other words, he explained, they occur at roughly the same time the second hand on universal clocks advances to a new number.
“If that’s the case, that’s got to make you very suspicious about some sort of cellphone tower interference or satellite that’s periodically blasting something,” he said. “That would mean it’s clearly associated with humans. ETIs don’t know how long our second is. … It means that the source is near us and knows about our time code.”
Ultimately, however, the analysis of the FRBs likely shows they appear to be following some sort of pattern, indicating that some form of intelligence, human or otherwise, is involved.
According to the paper, the odds of the pattern in the dispersion measures being attributed to a coincidence are only five in 10,000.
“In the end, we only claim interesting features which further data will verify or refute,” the paper concludes.
In response to that, a particularly hopeful Reddit.com reader, “hjkhjk349,” responded: “It’s the scientists’ way of saying ‘I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s totally aliens.’”
Email Colin M. Stewart at cstewart@hawaiitribune-herald.com.