Posted on 04/06/2015 6:49:05 AM PDT by BenLurkin
1. Is this the first time we think we might have found aliens? Nope, there have been several false alarms. The most famous is the 72-second Wow! signal, so called because an eager astronomer wrote "Wow!" next to it on a printout from the Ohio State Big Ear Telescope in 1977. It didn't seem to be of this Earth, but it was never seen again.
A few years before that, astronomer Jocelyn Bell thought she may have found the beep-beep-beep of "little green men" when she had actually discovered pulsars, the rapidly rotating corpses of stars that sweep a lighthouse-like beam of radiation as they spin. In the 70s, astronomers thought a Citizen's Band radio could be ET, and flagged the SOHO satellite as a possible signal in the 90s. But their double, triple and quadruple-checking rules meant they found the real culprits before making any announcements.
SETI software now weeds out false alarms pretty fast on its own, and there haven't been any major maybes in more than a decade – until now, perhaps.
...
6. What is the most likely explanation? The only thing we know for sure about fast radio bursts – and this potential pattern – is that they're telling us we don't understand something about the universe. Maybe what we don't understand is that we have cosmic cousins. But more likely, we're missing something fundamental about how pulsars work or what our own satellites are doing. Either we'll learn something about physics, or we'll learn something about interstellar biology. It's win-win.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Send more Chuck Berry!
The last remaining Air America affiliate?
I have a headache.
The “New Scientist” is the only “journal” carrying this schlock and is not peer reviewed.
If and when these “results” are published in something more reputable, I’d be the first to sit up and take notice.
Until then....
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