In the 400 year since Galileo Galilei first held a telescope to the heavens, astronomers have laid bare some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. They have seen comets crash into planets, found oceans inside moons, and witnessed the shudder of spacetime as black holes collide.
But spaceremains a realm of the unknown. Writing in the journal Nature on Thursday, scientists in Canada reported the detection of mysterious radio signals from halfway across the universe. It is only the second time that repeating fast radio bursts, or FRBs, have been spotted
Astronomers have yetto formulate a full theory of what produces these enigmatic, rapid-fire beam of electromagnetic waves. And in the absence of a firm explanation, speculation has fallen, perhaps inevitably, on alien civilisations. Avi Loeb, aHarvard astronomer, has proposed thet FRBs might be powerfull energy beam used to propel Alien Spacecraft.
The intersteller body, the first to be seen in the solar system, was initially spotted by researchers on the panstarrs telescope, which the University of Hawaii uses to scan the heavens for killer asteroids. Named after the Hawaiian word for "messenger", the body was picked up as it swept past Earth at 85 times the distance to the moon.
While many astronomers the object is an intersteller asteroid, it's elongated shape isunlike anything seen in the asteroid belt in our own solar system. Early observations of 'Oumuamua show that it is about 400m long but only one tenth as wide. "It's curious that the first object we see from outside the solar system looks like," said Loeb.
The body is now twice as far from Earth as the sun, but from that distance the green bank telescope can still detect transmissions as weak as those produced by a mobile phone. Loeb said that while he did not expect green bank to detect an alien transmission, it was worth checking.
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