As of today, 22 of them have been accepted and we still do not know what they mean, or where they come from from the vast Universe - fast breakthroughs of radio waves, similar to distant and very local bursts of energy. They last only milliseconds, but they are billions of times stronger than any signals received from our Galaxy.
The so-called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are intersegmental intergalactic bursts of radio waves detected 10 years ago with the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope. You might think that if we (gizmodo.com) pointed our telescopes towards where these bursts came from, we would all know what they are and where the signals came from. But today we have nothing - only radio waves.
“Perhaps the strangest explanation for FRBs is that they are part of an alien data exchange system,” says Professor Matthew Baileys of Dr. Swinburne's Observatory.
“We devoted a lot of time to research and tried many telescopes to understand the problem,” one of the study's authors, Emily Petroff, of the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy, says in an interview with gizmodo.com. “We have new windows with wavelength that we have never received before. We looked for high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos … we consistently went through and excluded many classes of sources, but we never found anything useful and we are still trying to figure out where this signal comes from."
FRBs are some of the most mysterious signals received by radio telescopes from the outer universe. No one knows exactly what they are connected with, and today many explanations are offered: from microwaves generated by massive stars to sources on board spaceships.
With only 22 of these signals confirmed to date, they may seem rare, but scientists believe such signals are actually quite common in the universe. It is possible that the Universe emits about 2000 such signals per day.
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The reason why these signals are so difficult for us to understand and carefully register is their duration, which is only 5 milliseconds. And then the next signal has to wait for years again.
It took years simply to prove the independent nature of these signals and to isolate them from the frequency interference constantly raging in space. And again it will take more years and years to receive not only 22 signals, but a large sample acceptable for study.
However, even today, based on the unusual polarization and magnetic density of these signals, some astronomers believe that the sources of the signals must be devices that propel someone's huge spacecraft.