If extraterrestrial and intelligent life really is there, somewhere in the vast ocean of the Cosmos, it would surely ask itself the same question as we do: ‘are we alone in the Universe?’. Furthermore, aliens would do everything they can to try to communicate with us, and radio signals coming to Earth from deep space triggered a lot of speculations.
Thanks to CBSNews.com, we now know that NASA scientists have been able to track down some of the origins of radio signals coming to our planet. And you might be disappointed by the answer.
Five FRBs are located in a galaxy’s spiral arm
NASA scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to trace the locations of five fast radio bursts (FRBs), meaning cosmic signals coming from deep space and that last for only a few seconds. Scientists were able to locate the host galaxies of the FRBs and the fact that these phenomenons originate from the ‘spiral arms’ of the galaxies, meaning the places where stars form.
Alexandra Mannings, who is the lead author of the study, declared:
Our results are new and exciting. This is the first high-resolution view of a population of FRBs, and Hubble reveals that five of them are localized near or on a galaxy’s spiral arms.
She continued by saying:
Most of the galaxies are massive, relatively young, and still forming stars. The imaging allows us to get a better idea of the overall host-galaxy properties, such as its mass and star-formation rate, as well as probe what’s happening right at the FRB position because Hubble has such great resolution.
There are a lot of scenarios to take into account when it comes to intelligent extraterrestrial life forms trying to contact us. They may be friendly and willing to take us to other worlds and teach us many secrets of the Universe. They could also be willing to turn us all into slaves and steal from us the secret for the game of craps. In all situations, we’ll have to wait a lot more to figure out their intentions, if they exist and if they’ll ever come in contact with us.
The new study is set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
