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FRBs: They aren’t aliens’ making fast radio bursts
It is Monday. For many of us, it is the first normal week of the new year. Kids are returning to college, astronomers are returning from AAS, and TV shows are returning from hiatus. As we try to figure out what normal is going to look like for 2020, I’d like to remind you that new normal probably doesn’t include aliens.
This weekend, I was a bit confused and disturbed to see reporting on fast radio bursts that implied these bursts were the kind of radio signals SETI has been searching for.
No.
Just no.
Last week there was a series of press releases that came out during the American Astronomical Society meeting concerning one very specific fast radio burst — FRB 180916.J0158+65 — and its location in a not too distant spiral galaxy. At the time, we didn’t cover this story because there just wasn’t a lot to cover.
Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond long bursts of radio emission that appear both as singular bursts and repeating bursts. The first FRB was discovered in archival data in 2007, and in the years since, attempts to discover the source of these bursts has been full of confusion. While archival searches have found bursts, observing them on purpose has been hard.
