Science
On Earth, a number of mysterious pulsating signals from outside the solar system have been received, scientists said.
Researchers believe that radio signals from space may have an artificial source (human or non-human).
So-called fast radio pulses are radio signals that last about a millisecond and release as much energy as the Sun produces per day.
This year, several such signals have been seen for the first time. To understand how far these fast radio pulses travel, astronomers use the scattering index: the farther the signal, the greater the scattering index.
Signals from space
The new study found 10 such fast radio pulses, and the intervals between the beginning and end of these signals were multiples of 187.5. This suggests that each of them came from separate sources located one after another at an equal distance from Earth.
However, the probability that these signals are arranged randomly is 5 in 10,000.
Scientists believe that it is unlikely that these equally-spaced radio signals were from another galaxy, as the dust would make a mess, and most likely the signal comes from ours the Milky Way galaxies.
The discovery was made by Michael Hippke from the Data Analysis Institute in Neukirchen, Germany, and John Learned from the University of Hawaii.
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Fast radio bursts can be caused by some natural but unknown processes, ranging from flashing stars to white dwarf mergers and neutron star collisions.
If we exclude these options, scientists consider the possibility of artificial origin (human or non-human), for example, technologies of intelligent beings.
“We're going to understand something really interesting,” said Michael Hippke. “This would either be a new physical phenomenon or, to rule out everything else, aliens.”
Extraterrestrial civilizations
In the 1960s, Russian scientist Nikolay Kardashev began to explore what radio signals from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might be. In his 1963 work “Information Transfer by Extraterrestrial Civilizations”, he classified extraterrestrial civilizations into 3 categories.
The signal from a type I civilization uses planetary energy from all its sources: solar, thermal, volcanic, tectonic, hydrodynamic, oceanic, etc.
A Type II civilization uses the energy of its star. To do this, it needs to capture radiation from the Sun, throw material into a black hole and absorb radiation, or travel to many planets and deprive them of their resources.
A Type III civilization is capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy, such as the Milky Way. If a type III civilization existed in the galaxy, it would be immersed in darkness, except for residual infrared radiation from major technological projects.