It is extremely unlikely that the regular and mysterious signals coming from deep space, the so-called fast radio bursts (Frb), which have long been the subject of extravagant hypotheses, are the work of alien civilizations. Seth Shostak, astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute, the program for the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, is convinced of this.
“One of the problems of the alien hypothesis – explains Shostak – is the great variety of distances of origin of the radio signals, some originating billions of light-years away, others hundreds of millions of light-years away”, he clarifies.
For experts, before E.T. there are many other valid theories. There are dozens of models that describe their formation, and all refer to extreme astrophysical contexts and high-energy sources. Among the main suspects are neutron stars, what remains of exploded stars, cosmic objects so dense that a teaspoon of their matter on Earth would weigh a billion tons, almost as much as 170 million elephants.
Among the most enigmatic phenomena in the universe, fast radio flashes are intense, very short radio pulses. They last a few thousandths of a second and come from galaxies billions of light-years away. Astrophysicists estimate that the universe emits an average of 5,000 fast radio flashes per day. The closest one has been identified as coming from a Milky Way-like galaxy about half a billion light-years away from Earth. This is the fifth such signal of its kind to be identified exactly, out of hundreds observed so far. And all of them are linked to non alien origins.
