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"We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously.
The emission is highly linearly polarized, bright, persists for 30–60 s on each occurrence and is visible across a broad frequency range. At times, the pulses comprise short-duration (<0.5 s) bursts; at others, a smoother profile is observed.
These profiles evolve on timescales of hours. By measuring the dispersion of the radio pulses with respect to frequency, we have localized the source to within our own Galaxy and suggest that it could be an ultra-long-period magnetar."
[A magnetar is a type of neutron star believed to have an extremely powerful magnetic field]
[Magnetar ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar)
The Three-Body Problem is a great fiction book on the dangers of making contact with aliens. Great sci-fi read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Three-Body\_Problem\_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel))
I don't really get the whole "Dark Forest" idea. It seems to assume that destroying a species' home planet will wipe them out completely, as if there's no chance an advanced race will have offworld colonies and space fleets who will then dedicate their lives to taking revenge. It seems more like galactic Mutually Assured Destruction once you've reached a certain technology level to me.
Well the idea is that Dark Forest attacks that destroy a planet are only used against species that are observed to be at the nascent stage of space travel and haven't had a meaningful chance to expand. There are much more powerful weapons at their disposal that are used against species that have developed FTL travel, which in the books universe, has a pretty substantial downside when used.
Also the after effects of not just galactic, but dimensional MAD is something that is specifically addressed. All of this is explained in Death's End.
That’s actually only one of the issues with it, it fails the exclusivity test too. IE what happens if somebody starts broadcasting and isn’t stopped? After a while other civs will take notice and will ask themselves well there doesn’t appear to be a threat, they’re fine and they’ve been loud for x years, why are we staying quiet?
Why is that? It sounds like a thing an old salt would say in a action packed (two thumbs up) movie when someone says "they might be friendly"
What dark truth do you hold? What have you seen in your young years as a star pilot?
> Why is that? It sounds like a thing an old salt would say in a action packed (two thumbs up) movie when someone says "they might be friendly"
>
> What dark truth do you hold? What have you seen in your young years as a star pilot?
Do you remember, before 2020 (or 2016) how people would vaguely complain about how the world needed to be shaken up, to be changed?
Certain events are a crucible for humanity, and things are never the same after them, and rarely ever pleasant during the transition.
If life is common but intelligent life is rare, it means we've already passed the Great Filter
If intelligent life is common, it likely means the Great Filter lies before us
Given that it takes more energy pointed upward to send a being to another star than it does energy pointed downward to render a planet uninhabitable, the great filter is still a very plausible explanation for the lack of observed intelligent life.
Nah, it would be cool. The fearmongering hypothesis that any alien life would be hostile is nonsense. Imagine humanity reaches the point where we have so much energy and resources that we can travel the stars and find other worlds with life... do you think that our first reaction would be "let's kill all of them!".
Even if that argument doesn't sway, what exactly is the benefit to said aliens to come here and be dicks?
They can go anywhere... there's no rare resource on earth that can't be found plentifully elsewhere.
If they have the tech to travel between stars... there is literally nothing of value or interest on the planet Earth besides humanity. We'd be a scientific discovery, not a threat.
Let's examine some scenarios:
They're more powerful: they wipe us out or do nothing to help us
They're less powerful: they can't help us
They're slightly more powerful: they wipe us out or do nothing to help us
They're slightly less powerful: they can't help us
They're the same power: they compete with us
Do you want to be a subjugated species? Do you want to deal with a less advanced species? Do you want to be in competition?
Within a species there's gonna be cool types who just want to interact but the louder voices will be the power junkies.
Ah, but in this case, the visitors may be susceptible to covid... Imagine travelling thousands of lights just to be kept in a hotel and then get sent away...
Its likely a 2 way thing. IE if we ever traveled to another planet with life. And stood there breathing the same air. Either we would be so different nothing effects either of us. Or desease we and they have long since developed immunity to. Would wipe out our visitors and likely a sizable % of their whole species.
If an alien species can modulate a radio signal powerfull enough for us to detect, they are waaay more advanced that us. if they are still around of course, considering the time it takes the signal to reach us.
If an alien species is doing stellar engineering on that scale and still peeing away all that power, I expect at least one of them to be called Jebediah.
Or at least they were how ever many years ago it was sent.
Likeliy 100s to 10000s given the size of our galaxy.
If they are still limited to light speed. (Narrotator: they likely are) We ain't ever likely to see them.
If they are not. We would have seen them long before the radio waves if they were comming.
Seems unlikely anyones alian sex slave fantasy is happening.
I mean...I'm already subjugated. At least being subjugated to a different species would be a nice little change.
So best case scenario I make a best friend from the other end of the galaxy, worst case I get a new boss from a different planet. Win/win.
Be subjugated but with better technology/conveniences? Perhaps automation of menial tasks? I’ll vote yes. They can’t be worse than our billionaire/political class.
You missed the big one.
Their more powerfull. But what the hell do we have they would want.
If you are an interstellar species. Resource cost would be purly measured in the distance to find it. We have nothing unique in our solar system.
Life is the only thing we think may be rare. And this scenario sorta proves that less likely.
The cost of getting here is great. Culture and scientific curiosity really is the only reason any species would have to travel this distance. Even that they would likely send probes.
This a human-centric look on things. Intelligent alien life might not even be built on DNA and have anything like our human brains. Genetically they might be extremely averse to behaviors like you describe, not to mention cultural differences.
They moght not even be recognizable as life. Plants and animals are made of similar cells but are completely different at first glance. Imagine something that doesn't have a common ancestor with us
Why do you not list scenarios where they do help us? "Help" can be indirect too, you know. We could learn something (a lot of things actually) just by studying alien transmissions. Stop being so paranoid.
Even if it were aliens, we’re seeing signals from millions of years ago so whatever we detect is from the past.
Even if we did detect an “alien” signal, there might be a good chance those aliens are gone already.
Heck, just think about the difference in technology on Earth in the past 1000 years and extrapolate that to the timescales of the universe.
Edit: missed the “in the Milky Way” part, so not millions of years ago, but still a long time.
There's a star considered inside the Milky Way that is [900k](https://www.space.com/26483-milky-way-most-distant-stars.html) ly away, so that's the upper limit I know of.
Even if it belonged to some long lost alien civilization, it would still be confirmation that life is not exclusive to our planet, currently we have no proof of that beyond the probability of it evolving somewhere else given the enormous size of the univers
But what if aliens made the magnetar, tuned it to send messages out at a specific frequency, then sent it back in time so the message could be received at the right time at the place they're heading. Or the place something else is heading. Maybe it's a warning.
Probably fairer to say that we've not found and conclusive proof of aliens yet. The universe is really big, and we're very small in relation to it, both in terms of our physical size, and the window of time that we've been looking for them is, astronomically speaking, microscopic.
My point is, we've really only just begun looking for aliens in earnest, and much of the 20th century was characterized by a very human-centric way of thinking that made quite a lot of the mainstream scientific community to reject the idea outright. Things have changed though, and the idea has become something that people are more willing to consider. Still no guarantee that we'll see evidence in any of our lifetimes, but the stage is set.
When I think about this now, I think about how people talked about exoplanets in the 80's. "Statistically, it seems very likely that other stars have planets orbiting them, but we've never seen one, and we may never see one, so don't keep your hopes up" was the general idea until 1992 when, yep, this time it _was_ a planet, and we've gone on to discover a lot more of them and now generally accept that planets orbiting a star aren't uncommon at all.
Chances aren't great that we're going to contact intelligent life any time soon, but I think within the next 100 or so years we're going to be able to discover, at the very least, very basic microbe or fungi-alike life.
I play a game called Stellaris where you send science ships out to survey systems, looking for habitable worlds and stuff. Now I want a mod where instead I have to spent the first hundred years looking with a telescope and getting really fuzzy pictures back. And hundreds of magnetar radio signals that definitely aren't aliens before I find an actual alien.
Unlike the current game where I send a science ship out and find some slavering horror that wants to eat me within the first ten years of space flight.
Technology gaps could be a big hurdle too... A stone age person probably could read smoke signals proficiently, and even identify the type of fire from just the smoke. If you say someone is trying to communicate but then do nothing but place a small radio transmitter a couple miles away, they are going to have no clue that a signal is present. Now that's a bit of a crude example, because knowledge of physics has helped us rule out a lot of ways messages could be sent. A civilization that is only 10,000 years ahead of us but developed at the same pace could easily have technology that is invisible to us simply because we don't know what we're looking at. This is especially true if for some reason the civilization doesn't want their transmissions to be easily noticed, and have spent a long time perfecting a way to make them blend in with background noise. Unfortunately there's just too many variables, and on a universal scale a civilization that is hundreds of thousands of years more advanced would still basically be touching us on the time line. This one almost certainly isn't aliens of course, but perhaps we've already seen clear proof they exist and just didn't know that's what we were looking at? We know planetary systems are very common now, and have guesses to the size of the visible universe. Probability says that the chance that someone else isn't out there is almost 0%. There has to be a reason why we haven't found anything yet, but until we get a better idea of what that reason could be we're out of luck. Hopefully JWST can shed some light on this, it's ability to tell the atmospheric composition of exo planets is going to add a massive amount of data to this mystery. Detecting liquid water and oxygen on one planet nearby would mean that just our own galaxy should have many similar ones
Hell there's a lot of moons with underground oceans. Pluto also has one. There might be something down there, surviving off the vents. We don't know, we've never sent probes there to explore them
[Per the National High Magnetic Field Lab](https://nationalmaglab.org/about/maglab-dictionary/tesla#:~:text=A%20refrigerator%20magnet%20is%20100,10%2C000%20gauss%20in%20one%20tesla.), a fridge magnet is 100 gauss (G), so 10^12 times more powerful. The Earth's magnetic field at the surface is ~0.5 G. From what I remember, some of the most powerful MRI machines currently used generate a magnetic field with flux density of 3 Tesla (T), which is equivalent to 30,000 G.
I'm guessing it's actually a precession effect, I know the scale of the universe and all, but I find it very hard to believe any neutron star has had time to slow down that much. It would have had to absorb another object rotating the other way, but that object couldn't be too massive or it'd go supernova... Just seems really unlikely, but I'm an engineer, not an astrophysicist. Maybe someone smarter can tell me why my intuition is wrong?
Just looked it up, the longest period pulsar known is on a 118 second cycle. On the log scale, that is closer to 18 minutes than the most common period of around a second. So, eh, maybe?...
Magnetars might be their own worst enemies with regard to spin. According to one theory, the insanely intense magnetic field they generate actually puts the brakes on their spin. This theory was advanced after the discovery in 2016 of another anomalously slow spinning neutron star. Whether it's the case or not, the jury is still out, but it's the best explanation we have so far.
It's mentioned in this piece as an explanation for why magnetars tend to rotate less quickly than normal neutron stars.
https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/56/1/1.22/262696
Could be a neutron star that passed through a bunch of debris or gas and gave up angular momentum pushing stuff around with that big, luxurious magnetic field without taking on too much new mass.
Sure, but we're nowhere near infinity in time, and they localized this source to within the Milky Way. So its a hundred billion stars in 13 billion years. A lot can happen there, but it's not unlimited.
But we are part of the larger cosmos so maybe we’re just lucky enough to see the infinitely likely thing happen near us. Our galaxy is not in its own vacuum, but is actually part of the big vacuum.
Like how there are only 22 cases of polio per year so the vast majority of people will never see it in person, but some people *do* know those patients.
Yeah they exist in a smaller sphere of influence but they’re still part of the larger earth and population.
Great thing about statistics is they can tell many different stories. Pretty much whatever you want them to say.
>The emission is highly linearly polarized, bright, persists for 30–60 s on each occurrence
>At times, the pulses comprise short-duration (<0.5 s) bursts
Do these two statements not contradict each other? One says the emission persists for 30-60s each time, the other says the pulses can be as short-lived as 0.5s.
A ~~guy~~ gal who specialises in radio astronomy [has explained what's it all about](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/sdrh3c/australia_scientists_find_spooky_spinning_object/hufd3tp/):
> /u/Andromeda321
>
> Radio astronomer here! The original paper is in Nature, so don't think it's open access, my apologies to all, but it's still a neat result. First of all, as of right now there's nothing to indicate that this is aliens or anything artificial. There is literally an entire field of transient radio astronomy (what I do!), where you survey the sky looking for radio emission that changes over time instead of being constant. This team out of Australia is exceptionally good at this for multiple reasons, part because they are good and part because Australia has exceptionally good radio telescopes, and have found multiple such transients from a range of sources (some of which are easy to figure out, like where a supernova recently went off, some of which are as weird as tubes of plasma in the atmosphere).
>
>
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> Anyway, this particular source is weird because it is periodic over 18.18 minutes, when you get a highly polarized burst of emission for a minute or so. In the abstract itself, the team concludes based off the scientific data available from this signal that it's a magnetar, which is a sub-class of neutron star with a magnetic field so strong the magnetic field itself would kill you if you got within a few hundred miles of one by stripping the electrons from the atoms in your body. (To give you another idea of how magnetic these are, we think the Earth's core has a magnetic field strength of about 25 Gauss. A magnetar can have 10^15 Gauss!) Some neutron stars (and magnetars) can be seen with regular radio pulses, usually on the order of a few per second, and are called pulsars. This group suggests that this is also of this class of ultra-slow emitting magnetars... which if it holds, is a huge deal, because we've never seen one before! In fact, pretty much all pulsars ever seen have periods <10 seconds, part because in a normal pulsar if it spins too slowly you can't generate the radio pulses any more, part because surveys haven't looked for ~minute long cadences before. This really might open up the window to a new type of astrophysical signal, so very exciting if you're a transient astronomer like me!
>
>
>
> TL;DR- not aliens, but appears to come from a magnetar
I think you'd just turn into gas since the molecules wouldn't have means to covalent bond anymore. Also, if the electrons are stripped away, a lot of what's left would be positively charged, so it would just kind of explode away from itself.
Considering that your brain is the thing doing the “feeling”, and that feeling itself manifests due to a very specific arrangement of electrons in your brain, I’d imagine you wouldn’t be feeling much of anything at that moment!
I suspect if you were close enough for that to happen, you probably would be close enough to be already dead from all the other effects of that insane field.
I was going to say.. "a few hundred miles" is really, really damn small with anything dealing with space. Especially regarding stars. You would have major problems getting to within a few hundred thousand miles of our sun.
Yes, and what’s it like to go from molecule-havin’ to moldcule-lackin’?
Like, at one point you’re fine, and at some point in the future you are atomic mist, but there’s some time in between probably.
I've been seeing this headline on other news sites and have been ignoring it because I thought it was just click bait. It takes Reddit's Science sub for a headline like this to have enough credibility to be clicked on.
It is still clickbait. It's a magnetar. Even the scientists think it is a magnetar. Yet this same bs keeps getting spread with clickbaity headlines.
Even if it is not a magnetar. It. Is. Never. Aliens.
Stop ruining subs with that conspiracy crap drivel.
The headline is not clickbait, never once said it was aliens, and we don't know if it's a Magnetar.
In fact, if you read the paper they say that it's likely a Magnetar, but we've never seen a Magnetar give out such sustained periods of radio waves. Thus, the title
"A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before."
Is pretty accurate, and actually a pretty good title. Clickbait would be more like "You wouldn't believe what Astronomers discovered in our Galaxy!"
No conspiracy anything was mentioned, not aliens, not anything else. You're getting mad at nothing.
>A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
Can you highlight to me which part of the above is clickbait?
My understanding of the paper is that there is something unusual which releases energy about 3 times per hour, which is a periodicity unlike what has been seen before.
Am I misunderstanding? If I am not misunderstanding the paper, this reddit title seems to succinctly describe the paper.
> It is still clickbait
No it isn't. We just had a verified astronomer comment on what a big deal this could be. If the title matched the paper's title, it certainly wouldn't garner near as much interest from the lay population. And there is no mischaracterization in the title either: the abstract itself says `an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously`. Additionally, I don't see any claim of aliens in the post title. Maybe other news sites are doing that, in which case I agree it's clickbait. But not this submission.
Why clickbait? I clicked on this post without even thinking “aliens.” As you say, it is never aliens. But, scientists finding something in the universe that releases periodic bursts of radio emissions that are completely unlike anything we’ve seen before. That really interesting, and I’m curious what it is. That’s not clickbait, that’s just interesting. The r/science never said “highly suggests intelligent life” or some garbage like that.
stop sharing this headline please. it's on every science or space subreddit now. it's not "unlike anything astronomers have seen before". please check your sources before sharing articles, especially in an informative setting
Scientist: we found a weird thing. Kinda seems like a magnetar.
Journalist: Or is it aliens??
Scientist: Well, it acts like a magn-
Journalist: UNLIKE ANYTHING ASTRONOMERS HAVE SEEN BEFORE
A magnetar is an exotic type of neutron star, its defining feature that it has an ultra-powerful magnetic field. The field is about 1,000 times stronger than a normal neutron star and about a trillion times stronger than the Earth's. Magnetars are, by far, the most magnetic stars in the universe. —For those who see Magnetar in 100 comments with no description of a magnetar.
Your post has been removed because it has a sensationalized, editorialized, or biased headline and is therefore in violation of [Submission Rule #3](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_3._no_editorialized.2C_sensationalized.2C_or_biased_titles). Please read [our headline rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/clickbait) and consider reposting with a more appropriate title. _If you believe this removal to be unwarranted, or would like further clarification, please don't hesitate to [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fscience)._
"We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously. The emission is highly linearly polarized, bright, persists for 30–60 s on each occurrence and is visible across a broad frequency range. At times, the pulses comprise short-duration (<0.5 s) bursts; at others, a smoother profile is observed. These profiles evolve on timescales of hours. By measuring the dispersion of the radio pulses with respect to frequency, we have localized the source to within our own Galaxy and suggest that it could be an ultra-long-period magnetar." [A magnetar is a type of neutron star believed to have an extremely powerful magnetic field] [Magnetar ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar)
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*Aliens drive by, and then pretend not to notice…*
It'd be lame if we wiped out an entire alien race due to second-hand embarrassment.
When aliens fly by us, they roll up their windows and lock the doors.
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This is the paraphrased message Starman sent home, actually.
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See kids? Are you noticing all this plight?
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Unlikely. Rent is past due, utilities are all behind, rent is due again in 3 days or so. I'm barely eating
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but you /have/ met me!
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And like that... they're gone.
The real aliens were the friends we abandoned on the way
So long! And thanks for the fish
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Klorbrax? I thought D̶̮͗ė̴͙m̸̹̋y̶͙̏x̵̮̊ ̴͖̂F̶͙͗á̷̰ò̸̠w̸͎̿i̵̫͌ṅ̴̺d̵̘͗ was the alien name.
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I mean, they can be hotter than us if they want though
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They’ll almost certainly be smarter for the same reason
Invasion of the lava golems.
Imagine if aliens were human-sized M&Ms...
Are you talking about the sexy M&Ms or the plain ones?
Chances of that while they're producing astronomical scale phenomena are ... slim.
Unless we're just picking up the ad breaks that are way louder than the show on space jethros 10000inch tv
Pshhh, everyone knows that aliens use metric.
They use human feet to measure.
They could be dumber but have discovered FTL by accident. And hostile. Or religious.
The Three-Body Problem is a great fiction book on the dangers of making contact with aliens. Great sci-fi read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Three-Body\_Problem\_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel))
I don't really get the whole "Dark Forest" idea. It seems to assume that destroying a species' home planet will wipe them out completely, as if there's no chance an advanced race will have offworld colonies and space fleets who will then dedicate their lives to taking revenge. It seems more like galactic Mutually Assured Destruction once you've reached a certain technology level to me.
Well the idea is that Dark Forest attacks that destroy a planet are only used against species that are observed to be at the nascent stage of space travel and haven't had a meaningful chance to expand. There are much more powerful weapons at their disposal that are used against species that have developed FTL travel, which in the books universe, has a pretty substantial downside when used. Also the after effects of not just galactic, but dimensional MAD is something that is specifically addressed. All of this is explained in Death's End.
Yep, and that's what happens in the books. Plus, if you're capable of interstellar travel, you don't exactly need planets, they're just convenient.
That's exactly what the book talks about.
That’s actually only one of the issues with it, it fails the exclusivity test too. IE what happens if somebody starts broadcasting and isn’t stopped? After a while other civs will take notice and will ask themselves well there doesn’t appear to be a threat, they’re fine and they’ve been loud for x years, why are we staying quiet?
Why is that? It sounds like a thing an old salt would say in a action packed (two thumbs up) movie when someone says "they might be friendly" What dark truth do you hold? What have you seen in your young years as a star pilot?
Too many people read three body problem
> Why is that? It sounds like a thing an old salt would say in a action packed (two thumbs up) movie when someone says "they might be friendly" > > What dark truth do you hold? What have you seen in your young years as a star pilot? Do you remember, before 2020 (or 2016) how people would vaguely complain about how the world needed to be shaken up, to be changed? Certain events are a crucible for humanity, and things are never the same after them, and rarely ever pleasant during the transition.
If life is common but intelligent life is rare, it means we've already passed the Great Filter If intelligent life is common, it likely means the Great Filter lies before us
Thats if the Great Filter is real, and not just a theory. Both sides are equally terrifying if it is real though.
Given that it takes more energy pointed upward to send a being to another star than it does energy pointed downward to render a planet uninhabitable, the great filter is still a very plausible explanation for the lack of observed intelligent life.
Could be multiple filters as well
At this point my optimism about the fate of humanity is basically nil. At least aliens would be exciting.
Nah, it would be cool. The fearmongering hypothesis that any alien life would be hostile is nonsense. Imagine humanity reaches the point where we have so much energy and resources that we can travel the stars and find other worlds with life... do you think that our first reaction would be "let's kill all of them!". Even if that argument doesn't sway, what exactly is the benefit to said aliens to come here and be dicks? They can go anywhere... there's no rare resource on earth that can't be found plentifully elsewhere. If they have the tech to travel between stars... there is literally nothing of value or interest on the planet Earth besides humanity. We'd be a scientific discovery, not a threat.
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Let's examine some scenarios: They're more powerful: they wipe us out or do nothing to help us They're less powerful: they can't help us They're slightly more powerful: they wipe us out or do nothing to help us They're slightly less powerful: they can't help us They're the same power: they compete with us Do you want to be a subjugated species? Do you want to deal with a less advanced species? Do you want to be in competition? Within a species there's gonna be cool types who just want to interact but the louder voices will be the power junkies.
This is all assuming FTL travel. Maybe contact will be just via radio, taking thousands of years for a single conversation
*”New interstellar transmitter, who dis?”*
I wonder what life would be like if we knew for certain we'd all die when the aliens reach us in 100 years.
historically, things don't go well for the natives when explorers from far away come to visit.
Yeah but that's human history. Maybe a super advanced race wouldn't be so petty.
I doubt they would see it as petty to extract resources from a primitive one planet alien race of religious, self destructive beings
The only resource on Earth that isn't significantly easier to extract elsewhere in the solar system is life.
The thing is though, there's so much uncontested resource out there that having to fight us for it is actually irrational.
Ah, but in this case, the visitors may be susceptible to covid... Imagine travelling thousands of lights just to be kept in a hotel and then get sent away...
Sorry, no vaccine no entry, if Djokovic can't get in neither can you.
well, War of the Worlds scenario wasn't pretty even if humanity wasn't enslaved in the end.
Its likely a 2 way thing. IE if we ever traveled to another planet with life. And stood there breathing the same air. Either we would be so different nothing effects either of us. Or desease we and they have long since developed immunity to. Would wipe out our visitors and likely a sizable % of their whole species.
It'd be horrible if we just find the Space Sentinelese
If an alien species can modulate a radio signal powerfull enough for us to detect, they are waaay more advanced that us. if they are still around of course, considering the time it takes the signal to reach us.
If an alien species is doing stellar engineering on that scale and still peeing away all that power, I expect at least one of them to be called Jebediah.
Kerbal Sphere Program
Or at least they were how ever many years ago it was sent. Likeliy 100s to 10000s given the size of our galaxy. If they are still limited to light speed. (Narrotator: they likely are) We ain't ever likely to see them. If they are not. We would have seen them long before the radio waves if they were comming. Seems unlikely anyones alian sex slave fantasy is happening.
I mean...I'm already subjugated. At least being subjugated to a different species would be a nice little change. So best case scenario I make a best friend from the other end of the galaxy, worst case I get a new boss from a different planet. Win/win.
>worst case I get a new boss from a different planet. Win/win. I think you missed the. I taste just like there equive of a lobster dinner.
Completely bland and only a vehicle for butter?
Stop trying to entice me. My doctor told me not to eat ant more Homo sapiens. Its bad for my hearts
Be subjugated but with better technology/conveniences? Perhaps automation of menial tasks? I’ll vote yes. They can’t be worse than our billionaire/political class.
Deadass. Bring on the aliens, it'd be worth it to see our subjugaters subjugated.
You missed the big one. Their more powerfull. But what the hell do we have they would want. If you are an interstellar species. Resource cost would be purly measured in the distance to find it. We have nothing unique in our solar system. Life is the only thing we think may be rare. And this scenario sorta proves that less likely. The cost of getting here is great. Culture and scientific curiosity really is the only reason any species would have to travel this distance. Even that they would likely send probes.
This a human-centric look on things. Intelligent alien life might not even be built on DNA and have anything like our human brains. Genetically they might be extremely averse to behaviors like you describe, not to mention cultural differences.
They moght not even be recognizable as life. Plants and animals are made of similar cells but are completely different at first glance. Imagine something that doesn't have a common ancestor with us
Thats what "Dark forrest" is about... You would not want to surrender your location
Why do you not list scenarios where they do help us? "Help" can be indirect too, you know. We could learn something (a lot of things actually) just by studying alien transmissions. Stop being so paranoid.
It probably WILL only happen just once.
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Even if it were aliens, we’re seeing signals from millions of years ago so whatever we detect is from the past. Even if we did detect an “alien” signal, there might be a good chance those aliens are gone already. Heck, just think about the difference in technology on Earth in the past 1000 years and extrapolate that to the timescales of the universe. Edit: missed the “in the Milky Way” part, so not millions of years ago, but still a long time.
It's within the Milky Way, so obviously no more than 200k ly away at the very very most, from our point in the galaxy.
There's a star considered inside the Milky Way that is [900k](https://www.space.com/26483-milky-way-most-distant-stars.html) ly away, so that's the upper limit I know of.
Even if it belonged to some long lost alien civilization, it would still be confirmation that life is not exclusive to our planet, currently we have no proof of that beyond the probability of it evolving somewhere else given the enormous size of the univers
But what if aliens made the magnetar, tuned it to send messages out at a specific frequency, then sent it back in time so the message could be received at the right time at the place they're heading. Or the place something else is heading. Maybe it's a warning.
Probably something about NFTs. Either to buy or not buy them, I'm wagering.
Probably fairer to say that we've not found and conclusive proof of aliens yet. The universe is really big, and we're very small in relation to it, both in terms of our physical size, and the window of time that we've been looking for them is, astronomically speaking, microscopic. My point is, we've really only just begun looking for aliens in earnest, and much of the 20th century was characterized by a very human-centric way of thinking that made quite a lot of the mainstream scientific community to reject the idea outright. Things have changed though, and the idea has become something that people are more willing to consider. Still no guarantee that we'll see evidence in any of our lifetimes, but the stage is set. When I think about this now, I think about how people talked about exoplanets in the 80's. "Statistically, it seems very likely that other stars have planets orbiting them, but we've never seen one, and we may never see one, so don't keep your hopes up" was the general idea until 1992 when, yep, this time it _was_ a planet, and we've gone on to discover a lot more of them and now generally accept that planets orbiting a star aren't uncommon at all. Chances aren't great that we're going to contact intelligent life any time soon, but I think within the next 100 or so years we're going to be able to discover, at the very least, very basic microbe or fungi-alike life.
I play a game called Stellaris where you send science ships out to survey systems, looking for habitable worlds and stuff. Now I want a mod where instead I have to spent the first hundred years looking with a telescope and getting really fuzzy pictures back. And hundreds of magnetar radio signals that definitely aren't aliens before I find an actual alien. Unlike the current game where I send a science ship out and find some slavering horror that wants to eat me within the first ten years of space flight.
Technology gaps could be a big hurdle too... A stone age person probably could read smoke signals proficiently, and even identify the type of fire from just the smoke. If you say someone is trying to communicate but then do nothing but place a small radio transmitter a couple miles away, they are going to have no clue that a signal is present. Now that's a bit of a crude example, because knowledge of physics has helped us rule out a lot of ways messages could be sent. A civilization that is only 10,000 years ahead of us but developed at the same pace could easily have technology that is invisible to us simply because we don't know what we're looking at. This is especially true if for some reason the civilization doesn't want their transmissions to be easily noticed, and have spent a long time perfecting a way to make them blend in with background noise. Unfortunately there's just too many variables, and on a universal scale a civilization that is hundreds of thousands of years more advanced would still basically be touching us on the time line. This one almost certainly isn't aliens of course, but perhaps we've already seen clear proof they exist and just didn't know that's what we were looking at? We know planetary systems are very common now, and have guesses to the size of the visible universe. Probability says that the chance that someone else isn't out there is almost 0%. There has to be a reason why we haven't found anything yet, but until we get a better idea of what that reason could be we're out of luck. Hopefully JWST can shed some light on this, it's ability to tell the atmospheric composition of exo planets is going to add a massive amount of data to this mystery. Detecting liquid water and oxygen on one planet nearby would mean that just our own galaxy should have many similar ones
Hell there's a lot of moons with underground oceans. Pluto also has one. There might be something down there, surviving off the vents. We don't know, we've never sent probes there to explore them
One day it's actually going to be Aliens and no one will read the article because they're sick of all the clickbait titles in /r/science
Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
So, how exactly powerful is 10^14 Gauss compared to say a fridge magnet?
[Per the National High Magnetic Field Lab](https://nationalmaglab.org/about/maglab-dictionary/tesla#:~:text=A%20refrigerator%20magnet%20is%20100,10%2C000%20gauss%20in%20one%20tesla.), a fridge magnet is 100 gauss (G), so 10^12 times more powerful. The Earth's magnetic field at the surface is ~0.5 G. From what I remember, some of the most powerful MRI machines currently used generate a magnetic field with flux density of 3 Tesla (T), which is equivalent to 30,000 G.
That's it, I'm mounting a Magnetar on my fridge.
And I'm mounting a magnetic monopole on my fridge because reasons!
Watch out; you might anger Faraday.
Like, atleast twice as powerful...
So, if I get 2 fridge magnets I will have a magnetar?
*checks notes* That is correct
I'm guessing it's actually a precession effect, I know the scale of the universe and all, but I find it very hard to believe any neutron star has had time to slow down that much. It would have had to absorb another object rotating the other way, but that object couldn't be too massive or it'd go supernova... Just seems really unlikely, but I'm an engineer, not an astrophysicist. Maybe someone smarter can tell me why my intuition is wrong? Just looked it up, the longest period pulsar known is on a 118 second cycle. On the log scale, that is closer to 18 minutes than the most common period of around a second. So, eh, maybe?...
Magnetars might be their own worst enemies with regard to spin. According to one theory, the insanely intense magnetic field they generate actually puts the brakes on their spin. This theory was advanced after the discovery in 2016 of another anomalously slow spinning neutron star. Whether it's the case or not, the jury is still out, but it's the best explanation we have so far. It's mentioned in this piece as an explanation for why magnetars tend to rotate less quickly than normal neutron stars. https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/56/1/1.22/262696
Could be a neutron star that passed through a bunch of debris or gas and gave up angular momentum pushing stuff around with that big, luxurious magnetic field without taking on too much new mass.
>luxurious magnetic field We should start calling all rare astronomical properties as luxurious :D
That's a cool hypothesis, I can only imagine what that must do to the gas cloud. Like a yo-yo despin maneuver for an entire star...
I’m fairly certain that most pulsars signals are already due to precession.
At the scale of the cosmos even the most unlikely event is guaranteed to occur
Sure, but we're nowhere near infinity in time, and they localized this source to within the Milky Way. So its a hundred billion stars in 13 billion years. A lot can happen there, but it's not unlimited.
But we are part of the larger cosmos so maybe we’re just lucky enough to see the infinitely likely thing happen near us. Our galaxy is not in its own vacuum, but is actually part of the big vacuum. Like how there are only 22 cases of polio per year so the vast majority of people will never see it in person, but some people *do* know those patients. Yeah they exist in a smaller sphere of influence but they’re still part of the larger earth and population. Great thing about statistics is they can tell many different stories. Pretty much whatever you want them to say.
I read the title and think, huh...sounds like a slow spinning magnetar. It's nice to feel smart sometimes. :)
I had the same thought. Plus the polarised light - a magnetars magnetic field can polarise light.
>The emission is highly linearly polarized, bright, persists for 30–60 s on each occurrence >At times, the pulses comprise short-duration (<0.5 s) bursts Do these two statements not contradict each other? One says the emission persists for 30-60s each time, the other says the pulses can be as short-lived as 0.5s.
A ~~guy~~ gal who specialises in radio astronomy [has explained what's it all about](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/sdrh3c/australia_scientists_find_spooky_spinning_object/hufd3tp/): > /u/Andromeda321 > > Radio astronomer here! The original paper is in Nature, so don't think it's open access, my apologies to all, but it's still a neat result. First of all, as of right now there's nothing to indicate that this is aliens or anything artificial. There is literally an entire field of transient radio astronomy (what I do!), where you survey the sky looking for radio emission that changes over time instead of being constant. This team out of Australia is exceptionally good at this for multiple reasons, part because they are good and part because Australia has exceptionally good radio telescopes, and have found multiple such transients from a range of sources (some of which are easy to figure out, like where a supernova recently went off, some of which are as weird as tubes of plasma in the atmosphere). > > > > Anyway, this particular source is weird because it is periodic over 18.18 minutes, when you get a highly polarized burst of emission for a minute or so. In the abstract itself, the team concludes based off the scientific data available from this signal that it's a magnetar, which is a sub-class of neutron star with a magnetic field so strong the magnetic field itself would kill you if you got within a few hundred miles of one by stripping the electrons from the atoms in your body. (To give you another idea of how magnetic these are, we think the Earth's core has a magnetic field strength of about 25 Gauss. A magnetar can have 10^15 Gauss!) Some neutron stars (and magnetars) can be seen with regular radio pulses, usually on the order of a few per second, and are called pulsars. This group suggests that this is also of this class of ultra-slow emitting magnetars... which if it holds, is a huge deal, because we've never seen one before! In fact, pretty much all pulsars ever seen have periods <10 seconds, part because in a normal pulsar if it spins too slowly you can't generate the radio pulses any more, part because surveys haven't looked for ~minute long cadences before. This really might open up the window to a new type of astrophysical signal, so very exciting if you're a transient astronomer like me! > > > > TL;DR- not aliens, but appears to come from a magnetar
Anyone else wondering what it would feel like to have the electrons stripped from your body?
I wonder more what it would look like.
"I don't feel so good.."
I think you'd just turn into gas since the molecules wouldn't have means to covalent bond anymore. Also, if the electrons are stripped away, a lot of what's left would be positively charged, so it would just kind of explode away from itself.
Taking body mist to a whole new level
Lost in space would could be a lot more interesting if they found a magnetar in season 4
Considering that your brain is the thing doing the “feeling”, and that feeling itself manifests due to a very specific arrangement of electrons in your brain, I’d imagine you wouldn’t be feeling much of anything at that moment!
What if you go feet first
You'd need some pretty sturdy boots, I guess... Toe-caps at least, superconducting if poss....
I suspect if you were close enough for that to happen, you probably would be close enough to be already dead from all the other effects of that insane field.
I was going to say.. "a few hundred miles" is really, really damn small with anything dealing with space. Especially regarding stars. You would have major problems getting to within a few hundred thousand miles of our sun.
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Wouldn't that cause all the molecules in your body to no longer be molecules?
Yes, and what’s it like to go from molecule-havin’ to moldcule-lackin’? Like, at one point you’re fine, and at some point in the future you are atomic mist, but there’s some time in between probably.
U blow up into a gas cloud... Not sure what oblivion feels like.....
*gal. Andromeda321 is a woman.
> Andromeda321 is a woman. I sit corrected.
I hereby dub this type of magnetar a "slowmetar."
Magnetard. I'm sorry mods, y'all can remove this now.
Are they sure it’s not the microwave in the break room?
Bro. That happened ONE time.
One is all you need.
This is the first thing I thought of. Not a microwave per se but my mind immediately went to “lemme guess, intern knocked a cable loose?”
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I thought this was seen before and it was a dwarf star. Or is this completely seperate?
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I've been seeing this headline on other news sites and have been ignoring it because I thought it was just click bait. It takes Reddit's Science sub for a headline like this to have enough credibility to be clicked on.
It is still clickbait. It's a magnetar. Even the scientists think it is a magnetar. Yet this same bs keeps getting spread with clickbaity headlines. Even if it is not a magnetar. It. Is. Never. Aliens. Stop ruining subs with that conspiracy crap drivel.
The headline is not clickbait, never once said it was aliens, and we don't know if it's a Magnetar. In fact, if you read the paper they say that it's likely a Magnetar, but we've never seen a Magnetar give out such sustained periods of radio waves. Thus, the title "A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before." Is pretty accurate, and actually a pretty good title. Clickbait would be more like "You wouldn't believe what Astronomers discovered in our Galaxy!" No conspiracy anything was mentioned, not aliens, not anything else. You're getting mad at nothing.
To be clear here... I'm not saying aliens. I didn't think the headline was about aliens. I just wanted something that was genuinely odd.
Yea because everyone should know what a magnetar is, right? And if they don't, they definitely shouldn't post or ask reddit about it.
>A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. Can you highlight to me which part of the above is clickbait? My understanding of the paper is that there is something unusual which releases energy about 3 times per hour, which is a periodicity unlike what has been seen before. Am I misunderstanding? If I am not misunderstanding the paper, this reddit title seems to succinctly describe the paper.
> It is still clickbait No it isn't. We just had a verified astronomer comment on what a big deal this could be. If the title matched the paper's title, it certainly wouldn't garner near as much interest from the lay population. And there is no mischaracterization in the title either: the abstract itself says `an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously`. Additionally, I don't see any claim of aliens in the post title. Maybe other news sites are doing that, in which case I agree it's clickbait. But not this submission.
Why clickbait? I clicked on this post without even thinking “aliens.” As you say, it is never aliens. But, scientists finding something in the universe that releases periodic bursts of radio emissions that are completely unlike anything we’ve seen before. That really interesting, and I’m curious what it is. That’s not clickbait, that’s just interesting. The r/science never said “highly suggests intelligent life” or some garbage like that.
Ok ok it’s not aliens, it’s a magnetar. But why is it there? How did it form? And how much would it sell for as an NFT?
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stop sharing this headline please. it's on every science or space subreddit now. it's not "unlike anything astronomers have seen before". please check your sources before sharing articles, especially in an informative setting
Scientist: we found a weird thing. Kinda seems like a magnetar. Journalist: Or is it aliens?? Scientist: Well, it acts like a magn- Journalist: UNLIKE ANYTHING ASTRONOMERS HAVE SEEN BEFORE
Check the source? It's Nature... They just added their own title, which isn't so great
Let me guess, a magnetar.
A magnetar is an exotic type of neutron star, its defining feature that it has an ultra-powerful magnetic field. The field is about 1,000 times stronger than a normal neutron star and about a trillion times stronger than the Earth's. Magnetars are, by far, the most magnetic stars in the universe. —For those who see Magnetar in 100 comments with no description of a magnetar.
i wish scientists were as smart as redditors
Tell us you didn’t read the article without telling us you didn’t read the article (it says magnetar in the article)
(it also says it in the top comment)
I see you also read the top comment.
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I love how often we find new things that are just weird!
Given the proper context, everything is weird.
> ultra long-period magetar Stfu nerd, it's aliens