Mysterious Deep Space Signal Picked up by Canada’s New Radio Telescope

nivek · Aug 2, 2018

The CHIME Pathfinder telescope in British Columbia.

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME; www.chime-experiment.ca) is a transit radio telescope consisting of four 20m x 100m cylindrical reflectors oriented North/South, plus a powerful F-X correlator, located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. The CHIME Fast Radio Burst (FRB) Project (CHIME/FRB Collaboration, ApJ, in press, arXiv:1803.11235) forms 1024 independent stationary intensity beams with 1-ms time sampling and 16k frequency channels over a range of 400 - 800 MHz. CHIME/FRB is a uniquely fast survey instrument that can search for FRBs over an instantaneous field of view of ~200 square degrees in real time.

During its ongoing commissioning CHIME/FRB detected FRB 180725A on 2018 July 25 at 17:59:43.115 UTC (topocentric, at 400 MHz). The automated pipeline triggered the recording to disk of ~20 seconds of buffered raw intensity data around the time of the FRB. The event had an approximate width of 2 ms and was found at dispersion measure 716.6 pc/cm^3 with a signal-to-noise ratio S/N ~20.6 in one beam and 19.4 in a neighbouring beam. The centres of these, approximately 0.5 deg wide and circular beams, were at RA, Dec = (06:13:54.7, +67:04:00.1; J2000) and RA, Dec = (06:12:53.1, +67:03:59.1; J2000).

However, precise localisation of the source and a flux estimate await further commissioning and calibration. The expected maximum Galactic line-of-sight dispersion measure in the source's direction is 69 pc/cm^3 (from the NE2001 model) or 81 pc/cm^3 (from the YMW16 model). The observed DM is far in excess of these values, even after accounting for the systematic uncertainties in the Galactic-DM models, confirming the identification of this event as an FRB. The event is clearly detected at frequencies as low as 580 MHz and represents the first detection of an FRB at radio frequencies below 700 MHz.

The de-dispersed frequency versus time plots for both beams can be found at the link below. Some frequency channels with terrestrial radio frequency interference have been zero-weighted. We do not find compelling evidence of scattering in the burst profile, and we caution against over-interpreting the band-limited structure of the pulse spectrum, as the data have not been corrected for frequency-dependent beam sensitivity. Further observations to search for repeated bursts at all wavelengths are encouraged.

Link to plot: FRB 180725A 'http://chime-experiment.ca/figures/chimefrb_1st_event.pdf'

Additional FRBs have been found since FRB 180725A and some have flux at frequencies as low as 400 MHz. These events have occurred during both the day and night and their arrival times are not correlated with known on-site activities or other known sources of terrestrial RFI.

We acknowledge local support from the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory and also support from our funding agencies (for a full list please see arXiv:1803.11235).

Footnote: We have named this event appending an upper-case letter, in alphabetical order corresponding to confirmed event number on the specified date. However, this approach is temporary and we look forward to discussing a sustainable convention with other FRB-detection experiments.

First detection of fast radio bursts between 400 and 800 MHz by CHIME/FRB

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SOUL-DRIFTER · Aug 2, 2018

Could a radio burst from a slow rotating pulsar get bounced off another celestial object and get the frequency altered?

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 2, 2018

SOUL-DRIFTER said:
Could a radio burst from a slow rotating pulsar get bounced off another celestial object and get the frequency altered?

The bursts are so powerful that astronomers think they're probably associated with black holes and/or neutron stars. And the signals must be passing through an extremely intense magnetic field to exhibit the frequency characteristics they're seeing. Here's an interesting article about the search for an astronomical explanation:

New Clues to the Origins of the Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts From Space | Smart News | Smithsonian

SOUL-DRIFTER · Aug 2, 2018

Thomas R. Morrison said:
The bursts are so powerful that astronomers think they're probably associated with black holes and/or neutron stars. And the signals must be passing through an extremely intense magnetic field to exhibit the frequency characteristics they're seeing. Here's an interesting article about the search for an astronomical explanation:

New Clues to the Origins of the Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts From Space | Smart News | Smithsonian

Thanks, an interesting article.

nivek · Aug 3, 2018

I've read some think it's possible these radio bursts are from an advanced alien source and could be designed as beacons or location points for navigation...This is speculation of course but I find it interesting...

...

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 3, 2018

nivek said:
I've read some think it's possible these radio bursts are from an advanced alien source and could be designed as beacons or location points for navigation...This is speculation of course but I find it interesting...
...

I've heard that kind of speculation and it just doesn't make any sense to me - I think it's safe to assume that any civilization that's capable of creating a signal like this by, say, throwing a magnetar into a supermassive black hole...would probably have a more efficient way of providing navigation signals. Look at the incredibly disruptive power of the energy involved:

"While that describes the environment near the source of the FRB, the cosmic object that can produce such a powerful signal is still a mystery. It is so powerful, it emits the same amount of energy our own sun produces in a day in just milliseconds. 'This is exotic. If we had one of these on the other side of our own galaxy — the Milky Way — it would disrupt radio here on Earth, and we’d notice, as it would saturate the signal levels on our smartphones,' Cornell astronomer and co-author James Cordes says. 'Whatever is happening there is scary. We would not want to be there.'”
New Clues to the Origins of the Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts From Space | Smart News | Smithsonian

So that means that the source of this signal is about 20 million times brighter than the Sun for a few milliseconds. That has to be an astronomical event - and a very dramatic one, imo.

CasualBystander · Aug 3, 2018

Thomas R. Morrison said:
I've heard that kind of speculation and it just doesn't make any sense to me - I think it's safe to assume that any civilization that's capable of creating a signal like this by, say, throwing a magnetar into a supermassive black hole...would probably have a more efficient way of providing navigation signals. Look at the incredibly disruptive power of the energy involved:

"While that describes the environment near the source of the FRB, the cosmic object that can produce such a powerful signal is still a mystery. It is so powerful, it emits the same amount of energy our own sun produces in a day in just milliseconds. 'This is exotic. If we had one of these on the other side of our own galaxy — the Milky Way — it would disrupt radio here on Earth, and we’d notice, as it would saturate the signal levels on our smartphones,' Cornell astronomer and co-author James Cordes says. 'Whatever is happening there is scary. We would not want to be there.'”
New Clues to the Origins of the Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts From Space | Smart News | Smithsonian

So that means that the source of this signal is about 20 million times brighter than the Sun for a few milliseconds. That has to be an astronomical event - and a very dramatic one, imo.

Well...

I' m not terribly impressed.

That's only about 372 gigatons of matter converted per burst.

That is the mass of a sort of average asteroid.

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 3, 2018

CasualBystander said:
Well...

I' m not terribly impressed.

That's only about 372 gigatons of matter converted per burst.

That is the mass of a sort of average asteroid.

Haha - so what you're saying is "372 gigatons of matter converted directly into radio-frequency electromagnetic energy" in one burst lasting a few milliseconds. Only major astronomical events convert that magnitude of mass into electromagnetic energy.

A supernova converts matter to energy at a greater rate than that, but they emit electromagnetic radiation across the entire spectrum and for a much longer time, so they're ruled out. It would have to be something much faster, like a bomb explosion.

Look at it this way: the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima, Little Boy, converted less than 1 gram of matter into energy. So this event had the power of 372,000,000,000,000,000 of those bombs going off at the same time (in other words, 3.72 million billion Little Boy nuclear bombs).

The most efficient means of converting matter to energy though, would be an antimatter bomb. But even at 100% efficiency, you'd need 186 gigatons of antimatter to fuel the reaction. NASA estimates that it would cost about $62.5 trillion to produce one gram of antihydrogen. That's roughly the annual GDP of our entire earthly civilization. So if we could somehow utilize our entire planetary GDP to make antimatter, it would take about 1.86 million billion years to produce enough antimatter to create the energy of one FRB. Even if we speculate that we could devise a method that's 1 million times more cost effective, we're still looking at dedicating our entire civilization to antimatter production for 186 billion years. But first we'd have to figure out how to narrow the emission spectrum to only the radio-frequency band. The only thing that I can think of would require detonating our 372+ gigaton matter/antimatter bomb deep in the gravity well of a black hole, so the gravitational redshift would lower the frequency of the gamma rays down the radio band.

In any case, I'd say that it would be an impressive technological achievement by any standard.

Or, FRBs are just rare and exotic astronomical events, something like a Magnetar falling into a black hole and spewing a jet of extremely high-intensity energy from both sides of the accretion disc.

3FEL9 · Aug 3, 2018

CasualBystander said:
Well...

I' m not terribly impressed.

That's only about 372 gigatons of matter converted per burst.

That is the mass of a sort of average asteroid.

I´m actually bit interested in how you calculated that number. Could you show me the figures and equation for it ?

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 3, 2018

Sailor said:
I´m actually bit interested in how you calculated that number. Could you show me the figures and equation for it ?

It's really just a series of conversions, once you know the power output of the Sun.

We're taking a very naive approach to the problem just to make the calculations tractable. For example, the only known physical process for converting matter directly into electromagnetic radiation, is the matter/antimatter reaction. In all macroscopic natural processes, however, the vast majority of the energy released goes into the kinetic energy of the escaping particles, and only a small percentage of the released energy gets turned into electromagnetic radiation. That's why I used the matter/antimatter example - it's the only scenario where a magnitude of matter and antimatter with an aggregate mass of about 400 gigatons could produce the amount of electromagnetic energy that we're talking about with regard to a typical fast radio burst (FRB) event. In any real-world natural scenario which could produce that much energy, it would require stellar-scale masses undergoing some kind of very sudden catastrophic event to release that much energy within a few milliseconds.

Here's the calculation:

Sun's power output = 3.828 × 10^26W = 3.828×10^26J/s

Seconds per day = 60sec x 60min x 24hrs = 86,400s

3.828 x 10^26 x 86,400s/day = 3.3074 x 10^31J/day

8.9876 x 10^16J = 1kg

3.3074 x 10^31J/(8.9876 x 10^16J/kg) = 3.67996 x 10^14kg [this is the mass equivalent of the Sun's output in one day, in kilograms]

1 ton = 907.185kg

3.67996 x 10^14kg/(907.185kg/ton) = 4.05646 x 10^11 tons

1 gigaton = 1,000,000,000 tons

4.05646 x 10^11 tons/(1,000,000,000 tons/gigaton) =

405.646 gigatons = Sun's output per day in units of gigatons of mass

So that's the mass equivalent of the electromagnetic energy released by a fast radio burst (FRB) event within the span of a few milliseconds.

Shadowprophet · Aug 4, 2018

Thomas R. Morrison said:
It's really just a series of conversions, once you know the power output of the Sun.

We're taking a very naive approach to the problem just to make the calculations tractable. For example, the only known physical process for converting matter directly into electromagnetic radiation, is the matter/antimatter reaction. In all macroscopic natural processes, however, the vast majority of the energy released goes into the kinetic energy of the escaping particles, and only a small percentage of the released energy gets turned into electromagnetic radiation. That's why I used the matter/antimatter example - it's the only scenario where a magnitude of matter and antimatter with an aggregate mass of about 400 gigatons could produce the amount of electromagnetic energy that we're talking about with regard to a typical fast radio burst (FRB) event. In any real-world natural scenario which could produce that much energy, it would require stellar-scale masses undergoing some kind of very sudden catastrophic event to release that much energy within a few milliseconds.

Here's the calculation:

Sun's power output = 3.828 × 10^26W = 3.828×10^26J/s

Seconds per day = 60sec x 60min x 24hrs = 86,400s

3.828 x 10^26 x 86,400s/day = 3.3074 x 10^31J/day

8.9876 x 10^16J = 1kg

3.3074 x 10^31J/(8.9876 x 10^16J/kg) = 3.67996 x 10^14kg [this is the mass equivalent of the Sun's output in one day, in kilograms]

1 ton = 907.185kg

3.67996 x 10^14kg/(907.185kg/ton) = 4.05646 x 10^11 tons

1 gigaton = 1,000,000,000 tons

4.05646 x 10^11 tons/(1,000,000,000 tons/gigaton) =

405.646 gigatons = Sun's output per day in units of gigatons of mass

So that's the mass equivalent of the electromagnetic energy released by a fast radio burst (FRB) event within the span of a few milliseconds.

Is that our sun Sol? That's wonderful information btw, What do you know about Isotropic beacons? Yes, They are hypothetical, But it's speculated that from distances like this, It would have to broadcast in all directions Like an Isotropic beacon to even stand a chance at hitting us. As hypothetical as an isotropic beacon would be, I view them as a feasible progression in technology. It's speculated that a type 2 civilization could achieve this. That brings me to my question, Wouldn't any signal from any intelligence out there be far more advanced than we? As they would almost certainly have perfected isotropic broadcasting?

Shadowprophet · Aug 4, 2018

Quick Rundown on the Drake Equation, Drake equation - Wikipedia

The Drake Equation is a very rough estimation of living intelligent capable life that could respond to our radio signals. The Drake Equation N=R*.fp.ne.f1.fi.fc.L

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R* = The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

The estimation based on our best current understanding, Taking the estimated lifespan of a civilization into account, Gives us an output of something like 17 possible active willing capable civilizations that could communicate with us. This is just an estimation, But the odds of us being alone in our galaxy are slim. That's just this galaxy, There are many others and I'd assume you could apply the Drake equation to them, But there is information we just don't know about these other galaxies, there may be radiation or gasses there that prevent life, We need more data.

But,If we are going to speculate extraterrestrial life we should base our numbers on something.

R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L=17 roughly.

Shadowprophet · Aug 4, 2018

You know, And that 17 is just an estimation for advanced life in the galaxy. It would likely be higher if you considered primitive life.

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 4, 2018

Shadowprophet said:
Is that our sun Sol?

Yes.

Shadowprophet said:
That's wonderful information btw, What do you know about Isotropic beacons? Yes, They are hypothetical, But it's speculated that from distances like this, It would have to broadcast in all directions Like an Isotropic beacon to even stand a chance at hitting us. As hypothetical as an isotropic beacon would be, I view them as a feasible progression in technology. It's speculated that a type 2 civilization could achieve this. That brings me to my question, Wouldn't any signal from any intelligence out there be far more advanced than we? As they would almost certainly have perfected isotropic broadcasting?

Thank you.

Honestly I think that looking for radio signals from alien civilizations is like looking for smoke signals from alien civilizations - EM radiation is extremely slow on cosmological scales, and the amount of power required to make an isotropic signal useful at any distances beyond a local stellar region, quickly becomes immense...and in my opinion, inadvisable. I say inadvisable because it's illogical to expect alien civilizations to be downright benevolent - on our planet, the most hostile predators on the planet evolved into the dominant sentient life form. It's sensible to expect that same pattern to emerge on other planets. Announcing one's presence, and general technological capabilities, to rival predators throughout the galaxy...that sounds like a very bad idea to me.

We're in a weird position with respect to interstellar communication. We're still basing our ideas on what's essentially a 19th Century technology - radio waves, and EM radiation in general. But we know that this kind of technology is a rotten solution to interstellar communication because of the enormous time delay characteristics, and the intrinsic square-law energy dispersion (unless you're using a targeted laser signal). But we haven't figured out a better method yet. I assume that "they" have already figured out better methods, and they're probably using them right now, totally undetectable by our modern technology.

Here's the other thing to bear in mind: we've been visited by an awful lot of different types of alien craft over the last 70+ years. And as far as we know, not once have they tried to communicate with us. So clearly they don't want to talk to us. And that's troubling in its own right, but it also strongly suggests that they'll be as unwilling to chat with us over interstellar radio, as they are to chat with us while they're blithely navigating our airspace with impunity.

I don't know if they find us to be too primitive, too stupid, too violent, or too doomed, to bother communicating with us. But clearly their response to us is "talk to the hand...sayonara, suckers!" So I think that they're in control of communication: when they want to talk to us, they will. I just find it very troubling that none of them have offered to have a nice chat, evidently. Instead, they come and go like thieves in the night - I don't find that reassuring, at all.

Shadowprophet said:
You know, And that 17 is just an estimation for advanced life in the galaxy. It would likely be higher if you considered primitive life.

I dunno how you came up with that number - the Drake equation has all manner of subjective variables in it. But the Kepler Mission analyses have yielded estimates starting around 20 billion warm, habitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone - and many more if we include habitable Moons, and other forms of organic chemistry like silicon-based life forms. And the same kinds of analyses place the average age of Earth-like worlds around 1-3 billion years older than the Earth.

So looking at those numbers, I tend to arrive at a model where there are many thousands if not millions of technological alien civilizations in our galaxy, the vast majority of which are absurdly more advanced and evolved than we are, so by galactic standards we're probably about as interesting to them, as a tribe of howler monkeys is to us. We may be fun to tag and dissect from time to time for scientific purposes, but I seriously doubt they'd consider us as a viable roommate.

Shadowprophet · Aug 4, 2018

Thomas R. Morrison said:
Yes.

Thank you.

Honestly I think that looking for radio signals from alien civilizations is like looking for smoke signals from alien civilizations - EM radiation is extremely slow on cosmological scales, and the amount of power required to make an isotropic signal useful at any distances beyond a local stellar region, quickly becomes immense...and in my opinion, inadvisable. I say inadvisable because it's illogical to expect alien civilizations to be downright benevolent - on our planet, the most hostile predators on the planet evolved into the dominant sentient life form. It's sensible to expect that same pattern to emerge on other planets. Announcing one's presence, and general technological capabilities, to rival predators throughout the galaxy...that sounds like a very bad idea to me.

We're in a weird position with respect to interstellar communication. We're still basing our ideas on what's essentially a 19th Century technology - radio waves, and EM radiation in general. But we know that this kind of technology is a rotten solution to interstellar communication because of the enormous time delay characteristics, and the intrinsic square-law energy dispersion (unless you're using a targeted laser signal). But we haven't figured out a better method yet. I assume that "they" have already figured out better methods, and they're probably using them right now, totally undetectable by our modern technology.

Here's the other thing to bear in mind: we've been visited by an awful lot of different types of alien craft over the last 70+ years. And as far as we know, not once have they tried to communicate with us. So clearly they don't want to talk to us. And that's troubling in its own right, but it also strongly suggests that they'll be as unwilling to chat with us over interstellar radio, as they are to chat with us while they're blithely navigating our airspace with impunity.

I don't know if they find us to be too primitive, too stupid, too violent, or too doomed, to bother communicating with us. But clearly their response to us is "talk to the hand...sayonara, suckers!" So I think that they're in control of communication: when they want to talk to us, they will. I just find it very troubling that none of them have offered to have a nice chat, evidently. Instead, they come and go like thieves in the night - I don't find that reassuring, at all.

I dunno how you came up with that number - the Drake equation has all manner of subjective variables in it. But the Kepler Mission analyses have yielded estimates starting around 20 billion warm, habitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone - and many more if we include habitable Moons, and other forms of organic chemistry like silicon-based life forms. And the same kinds of analyses place the average age of Earth-like worlds around 1-3 billion years older than the Earth.

So looking at those numbers, I tend to arrive at a model where there are many thousands if not millions of technological alien civilizations in our galaxy, the vast majority of which are absurdly more advanced and evolved than we are, so by galactic standards we're probably about as interesting to them, as a tribe of howler monkeys is to us. We may be fun to tag and dissect from time to time for scientific purposes, but I seriously doubt they'd consider us as a viable roommate.

I'm not certain where I was reading when I came up with 17, But we must take into account that a civilization must have an active lifespan, A time of ending. We take into account that some radio signals we receive will be from long-dead civilizations. I acquire the number by processing the Drake equation only to a list of the cataloged Earth-like planets discovered, Not really estimations of how many Earth-like planets could exist. I was aiming for accuracy in the Data we can confirm. List of potentially habitable exoplanets - Wikipedia

Shadowprophet · Aug 4, 2018

It could be considered a misapplication of the Drake equation to apply it only to cataloged earth-like planets Because it's based on an inaccurate model when you consider planet formation. But, Hindsight is 20/20

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 4, 2018

Shadowprophet said:
But we must take into account that a civilization must have an active lifespan, A time of ending. We take into account that some radio signals we receive will be from long-dead civilizations.

Honestly I don't know how to deal with the lifespan of a technological civilization. Consider our own situation - there have been many civilizations on the Earth already, throughout our history spanning eons. They rise and fall, and are replaced by new civilizations. Will this process continue, essentially forever? Or will we one day do something incredibly stupid, or fall prey to some astronomical extinction-level event? And what if we colonize other inhabitable worlds before our Earth civilization perishes? I don't know what to expect, because we're the only example that we have to go by, and our species has persisted and progressed in fits and starts for thousands of years. So it's a huge question mark. Maybe, once a sentient technological civilization appears on a planet, it usually continues in one form or another as long as that planet is habitable. Or maybe technological civilizations tend to wipe themselves out fairly quickly, with geological time spans between relatively brief moments of technological advancement. It's a really complicated issue. I don't think, at this point, that we can say one way or the other. So that adds in a huge uncertainty factor that dramatically impacts the Drake equation.

But since we seem to be lumbering forward, and have managed to do so for eons, I tend to expect that we'll continue to do so. I realize that it's a tenuous, and probably overly optimistic assessment, but it's the best I can do with the limited data we have.

As far as receiving EM signals from long-dead civilizations, that's probably unlikely. Using today's radio telescope technology, we couldn't pick up any communications transmissions from a planet at a similar level of technological development, from a distance of more than a few light-years (LYs). Maybe a few dozen LYs, if they intentionally broadcast a very powerful signal to announce their presence (which we haven't done ourselves, btw). So this idea that we'll pick up a signal across hundreds, or thousands or more light-years away, just doesn't seem logical to me. I expect that any civilization that becomes more advanced than we are today, will probably find a better way to communicate across vast distances. Perhaps by sending out faster-than-light probes for a more up-close and personal look around, for example.

CasualBystander · Aug 6, 2018

Thomas R. Morrison said:
It's really just a series of conversions, once you know the power output of the Sun.

We're taking a very naive approach to the problem just to make the calculations tractable. For example, the only known physical process for converting matter directly into electromagnetic radiation, is the matter/antimatter reaction. In all macroscopic natural processes, however, the vast majority of the energy released goes into the kinetic energy of the escaping particles, and only a small percentage of the released energy gets turned into electromagnetic radiation. That's why I used the matter/antimatter example - it's the only scenario where a magnitude of matter and antimatter with an aggregate mass of about 400 gigatons could produce the amount of electromagnetic energy that we're talking about with regard to a typical fast radio burst (FRB) event. In any real-world natural scenario which could produce that much energy, it would require stellar-scale masses undergoing some kind of very sudden catastrophic event to release that much energy within a few milliseconds.

Here's the calculation:

Sun's power output = 3.828 × 10^26W = 3.828×10^26J/s

Seconds per day = 60sec x 60min x 24hrs = 86,400s

3.828 x 10^26 x 86,400s/day = 3.3074 x 10^31J/day

8.9876 x 10^16J = 1kg

3.3074 x 10^31J/(8.9876 x 10^16J/kg) = 3.67996 x 10^14kg [this is the mass equivalent of the Sun's output in one day, in kilograms]

1 ton = 907.185kg

3.67996 x 10^14kg/(907.185kg/ton) = 4.05646 x 10^11 tons

1 gigaton = 1,000,000,000 tons

4.05646 x 10^11 tons/(1,000,000,000 tons/gigaton) =

405.646 gigatons = Sun's output per day in units of gigatons of mass

So that's the mass equivalent of the electromagnetic energy released by a fast radio burst (FRB) event within the span of a few milliseconds.

Yup.

Mass of Ceres: 939.3 Peta Tonnes (10**15).

Lets assume 5 milliseconds pulse every second or so (to make math easy).

If you ground up Ceres and fed it to your mass converter it could run your radio for about 27 days.

3FEL9 · Aug 6, 2018

Thomas R. Morrison said:
It's really just a series of conversions, once you know the power output of the Sun.

We're taking a very naive approach to the problem just to make the calculations tractable. For example, the only known physical process for converting matter directly into electromagnetic radiation, is the matter/antimatter reaction. In all macroscopic natural processes, however, the vast majority of the energy released goes into the kinetic energy of the escaping particles, and only a small percentage of the released energy gets turned into electromagnetic radiation. That's why I used the matter/antimatter example - it's the only scenario where a magnitude of matter and antimatter with an aggregate mass of about 400 gigatons could produce the amount of electromagnetic energy that we're talking about with regard to a typical fast radio burst (FRB) event. In any real-world natural scenario which could produce that much energy, it would require stellar-scale masses undergoing some kind of very sudden catastrophic event to release that much energy within a few milliseconds.

Here's the calculation:

Sun's power output = 3.828 × 10^26W = 3.828×10^26J/s

Seconds per day = 60sec x 60min x 24hrs = 86,400s

3.828 x 10^26 x 86,400s/day = 3.3074 x 10^31J/day

8.9876 x 10^16J = 1kg

3.3074 x 10^31J/(8.9876 x 10^16J/kg) = 3.67996 x 10^14kg [this is the mass equivalent of the Sun's output in one day, in kilograms]

1 ton = 907.185kg

3.67996 x 10^14kg/(907.185kg/ton) = 4.05646 x 10^11 tons

1 gigaton = 1,000,000,000 tons

4.05646 x 10^11 tons/(1,000,000,000 tons/gigaton) =

405.646 gigatons = Sun's output per day in units of gigatons of mass

So that's the mass equivalent of the electromagnetic energy released by a fast radio burst (FRB) event within the span of a few milliseconds.

Could the FRB simply be the distant trace from an output of an Alien impulse propulsion unit ?

Thomas R. Morrison · Aug 6, 2018

Sailor said:
Could the FRB simply be the distant trace from an output of an Alien impulse propulsion unit ?

It seems unlikely - I can't imagine any starship surviving a 400 gigaton matter/antimatter detonation. If the AAVs we've seen operating in our atmosphere are any indication, warp field propulsion systems don't produce any kind of high-energy emissions, and they seem to be the popular choice for interstellar travel.

Mysterious Deep Space Signal Picked up by Canada’s New Radio Telescope

As Above So Below

Life Long Researcher

Meh

Life Long Researcher

As Above So Below

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Celestial

Meh

Islander

Meh

Truthiness

Truthiness

Truthiness

Meh

Truthiness

Truthiness

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Celestial

Islander

Meh