HONG KONG: For nearly a decade, astronomers have puzzled over powerful bursts of radio energy that seem to be hailing from billions of light years away. Recently, we received reports of a new wrinkle to this mystery: The bursts appear to follow a mathematical pattern, one that doesn’t line up with anything we know about cosmic physics.
And, of course, when we hear “mathematical pattern,” “radio transmission,” and “outer space,” all strung together, we immediately jump to our favorite explanation—aliens! (Or, you know, a decaying pulsar star, an unmapped spy satellite, or a cell phone tower.)
It’s also possible that the pattern doesn’t actually exist.
Since 2007, telescopes have picked up nearly a dozen so-called “fast radio bursts,” pulses that last for mere milliseconds, but erupt with as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Where could they be coming from? To find out, a group of researchers took advantage of a simple principle: That higher frequency radio waves encounter less interference as they traverse space, and are detected by our telescopes earlier than lower frequency waves. The time delay, or “dispersion measure”, between higher and lower frequency radio waves from the same pulse event can be used to determine the distance those waves traveled.
Here’s where things got weird. When researchers calculated the dispersion distance for each of eleven fast radio bursts, they found that each distance is an integer multiple of a single number: 187.5. When plotted on a graph, as the researchers show us in Figure 1 of their paper, the points form a striking pattern.
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