Scientists and regular people have wondered if alien civilizations are trying to contact us after mysterious FRBs (fast radio bursts) were detected by our cosmic tools. If it’s true, we have to admit that there’s a chance that aliens may not be willing to unveil for us the secrets of the Universe.
But recent discoveries show that aliens are not responsible for the intercepted FRBs. The culprit is a magnetar, a highly magnetic neutron star.
FRB within the Milky Way has raised the curiosity of astronomers
The study shows that magnetars are behind at least some of the fast radio bursts (FRBs) from other galaxies. The source for these peculiar phenomenons was a mystery for plenty of years, but you know how things go in astronomy: the more you live, the more you uncover new discoveries. Ben Margalit, who is an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, declared:
When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘No way. Too good to be true,
Just, wow. It’s really an incredible discovery.
The magnetar found is located at 30,000 light-years from Earth, and it has been dubbed as SGR 1935+2154. About 3 x 1034 ergs of energy from the burst has been detected by The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, a radio telescope from British Columbia.
The researchers describe the radio burst caused by the magnetar at arXiv.org on May 20 and May 21.
Therefore, we will have to wait a lot more until humanity ever encounters alien civilizations. But we cannot overlook what the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said once, regardless of how much we want otherwise. He suggested that a technologically advanced alien civilization would see us just the same way we’re looking at worms:
You don’t walk by the worm on the street and say, ‘Gee, I wonder what he’s thinking.’ No, you step on the worm
Judging by how unimaginably huge the Universe is, alien life should be quite common. The problem is that the distances could be way too big to be traveled during a human lifetime.
