Aliens! (different ones.)

POSTED BY: DREAMTROVE
UPDATED: Sunday, March 12, 2017 05:43
VIEWED: 1590
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DREAMTROVE

Friday, March 10, 2017 8:55 PM

Quote:

WaPo:

Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts
By Ben Guarino March 10 at 6:05 AM

An artist’s illustration of a light-sail powered by a radio beam (red) generated on the surface of a planet. Come sail away, indeed. (M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics)

In 2007, a West Virginia University astrophysicist named Duncan Lorimer detected a brief yet intense signal while combing through archival data from the Parkes Observatory telescope in Australia. The signal was quick. The spurt of radio activity, originating from a source other than our galaxy, lasted fewer than 5 milliseconds. And it was furious. To generate such a burst would require 500 million times the power of our solar system’s sun. The unknown source of the signal prompted intense speculation.

One proposal, to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, may be the wildest yet: Sailing aliens.

“An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking,” said Avi Loeb, a theorist and author of the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement on Thursday.

A decade ago, Lorimer and his mentor, Matthew Bailes, described the phenomenon as a fast radio burst, or FRB. “Duncan Lorimer and I were just completely gobsmacked,” said Bailes, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, to The Washington Post. “The day we discovered the first FRB we couldn’t sleep.” Astrophysicists have detected only 25 other FRBs since Bailes and four other astronomers published their groundbreaking report in 2007, he said.

But the origin of FRBs remained an open question. The problem proved to be at once formidable, resilient and brain twisting. Some scientists proposed that FRBs were the fault of massive neutron stars, suns that had collapsed into dense cores. Perhaps there existed stellar flares capable of spitting out a radio wave that traveled across half of the known universe. Or maybe vanishing black holes spewed the FRBs our way.

“I am not exaggerating when I say there are more models for what FRBs could be than there are FRBs,” Cornell University astronomer Shami Chatterjee told The Washington Post in January.
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[Mysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, astronomers discover]

“We don’t have a convincing model for FRBs at the moment,” Bailes said. “The leading model is some form of very exotic neutron star.”

The new hypothesis put forth by a pair of theorists at the Center for Astrophysics was even more exotic. Loeb and his co-author, Manasvi Lingam, ditched natural sources entirely. They speculated that FRBs could, in theory, be traced back to extragalactic civilizations. Specifically, aliens who flashed superpowered beacons or cruised through space on the wings of giant light-sail technology.

“It’s a delightful thought experiment,” said Bailes, who was not involved with the paper. (Bailes told The Post he considered himself more of an FRB hunter than a theorist.) But, he said, the new hypotheses amounted to an “incredible long shot.”

The two Harvard theorists recognized that their FRB origin story dealt with possibility, not probability. “Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities,” Loeb said. “It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”

FRBs could represent artificial beams, Loeb and Lingam wrote, created by a far-off civilization either as giant beacons or “for driving light sails.” Given the luminosity of the FRBs detected on Earth, an intelligent civilization would need to harness energy from a sun and cool the machinery with planet-sized amounts of water. Although alien traffic controllers would need to keep this beam aimed at the sail, distant observers would see only a flash as the beam pivoted across the universe.

When sailing by light, the sun’s radiation provides propulsion. If caught by a large

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DREAMTROVE

Saturday, March 11, 2017 2:03 AM

Huh. Tiny ships. The problem I've always had with the solar sail was how do you send something so large. maybe we need to make smaller colonists as well.

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Sunday, March 12, 2017 3:07 AM

This solar sail technological discussion was laid out quite well in the novel Saturn Run (John Sandford).
America and China must race to Saturn.

DREAMTROVE

Sunday, March 12, 2017 5:43 AM

And Russia perhaps. And Japan, India, maybe even Iran. Brazil? EU? And then America's ultimate competitor: Private sector America. Who will win, of course.