Alleged 'Alien Call' That Baffled Scientists Has Been Traced To Its Origin After 10 Years

The so-called "alien call" coming from the broad part of the universe has been traced. The mysterious FRBs that baffled the scientists for 10 years have been drawn to their source.

The fast radio bursts or FRBs have been detected 18 times since the scientists have heard these back in 2007. No one ever knows and left the scientists puzzled to where their origins come from or what might have triggered them.

Speculations show that these came from a huge star. For some, they are from the jets of materials shooting out of a black hole, and some are said to come from aliens.

The FRBs do not last more than a millisecond, though they are powerful but very short radio waves. The first to be detected was by Australia's Parkes telescope in 2007. Since then, 17 others have followed and only one of which has been detected repeatedly.

Independent reported that the repeated burst allows the scientists to study it for six months and look for its definite place in the space. The scientists said that the FRBs were likely to be from a 3 billion lightyears away faint dwarf galaxy. 

FRB 121102 was found using the Very Large Array. It is a radio telescope with a multi-antenna and is being operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

McGill University in Montreal, Canada, team member Dr. Shriharsh Tendulkar said that, "Before we knew the distance to any FRBs, several proposed explanations for their origins said they could be coming from within or near our own Milky Way galaxy. We now have ruled out those explanations, at least for this FRB."

The FRB reveals that it is being accompanied by a stream of ongoing, persistent weaker radio emissions; thus, it adds more question to the scientists. The scientists added in the journals Nature and The Astrophysical Journal Letters that, "Further high precision observations showed that the two emission sources could not be more than 100 light years apart."

Coming from the Joint Institute for VLBI in Dwingeloo, Netherlands, Dr. Benito Marcote shared that, "We think that the bursts and the continuous source are likely to be either the same object or that they are somehow physically associated with each other."

However, what produced the FRB is still unknown. One chance could be that it is coming from a super-dense neutron star, possibly a "magnetar." Thus, the co-author from Cornell University, Dr. Shami Chatterjee, mentioned that, "Finding the host galaxy of this FRB, and its distance, is a big step forward, but we still have much more to do before we fully understand what these things are," according to Mirror.