THE PLANETS:
For the past decade, scientists have been puzzling over powerful, millisecond-long flashes of energy from deep space. Some scientists think these “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs, come from natural sources, such as newborn neutron stars or black holes. Others think they could be signals from alien civilizations.
One thing’s for sure: FRBs are more common than we realized. In the latest discovery, scientists working as part of a $100-million initiative known as Breakthrough Listen used artificial intelligence to detect dozens of additional FRBs coming from FRB 121102, an as-yet-uncharacterized source in a galaxy 3 billion light-years from Earth.
The work is the first step in the initiative’s grander plans for using AI to find hidden patterns in the bigger sea of cosmic signals that come our way — research that could finally provide an answer to that eternal question: Are we alone in the universe?
- "It's a great way of developing the kinds of techniques that we ultimately want to use to find other types of signals that might come from extraterrestrial intelligence," says Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
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