MOSCOW, Oct. 24There is no reason to believe that the source of fast radio bursts could be extraterrestrial civilizations; most likely, they come from magnetars, said Ilya Mereminsky, a researcher at the Department of High Energy Astrophysics at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS).
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"U We have no reason to believe that this is somehow connected with extraterrestrial life. Moreover, we know that the same or very similar events are happening in our galaxy <…> Such sources of radio bursts are apparently associated with neutron stars and magnetars. In general, I wouldn’t count on anyone living near magnetars,” the scientist explained.
He called the new discovery of fast radio bursts at record distances an “interesting” but rather “expected” event.
«They were discovered not so long ago for various technical reasons in the first place. At first they were simply found and found out that they exist at all. Then they learned to determine their depth, began to understand where exactly they came from. Then they began to do this more and more actively and find them all further and further. Now we have managed to find it at a great distance on a cosmological scale, about twice as far as it was possible to do so before,” Mereminsky noted.
An international team of researchers previously detected a distant burst of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach Earth. Scientists cannot yet say with complete certainty how such radio bursts arise. The media takes advantage of this, still calling them “alien signals.”
“Fast Radio Bursts” or FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts) in modern astrophysics are single radio pulses of a few milliseconds of unknown nature recorded by radio telescopes. A fast radio burst was first detected in February 2007.
Magnetars are neutron stars that have the strongest magnetic fields observed in the Universe. These are ultra-compact objects that, with a diameter of 12-20 kilometers, have a mass comparable to the mass of the Sun or even exceeding it. Magnetars are characterized by powerful emissions of X-ray and gamma radiation.
May 18, 12:00