Mysterious fast radio burst signal that could be evidence of an advanced alien civilisation is spotted further from Earth than EVER before

As mystery about the universe continues, the idea that aliens are sending out fast radio bursts (FRB) is extremely tantalizing.

These strange signals were first discovered 15 years ago, but experts have no idea how or why they appear.

But what they now know is that fast radio bursts can be used to measure “missing” matter between galaxies, which is particularly exciting because it offers us a new way to “weigh” the universe.

The discovery came after astronomers discovered the most distant and powerful FRB ever detected, which came from a galaxy so far away that it took eight billion years to reach us.

The mysterious signal may have lasted less than a millisecond, but it released an enormous amount of energy, equivalent to the total emission of our Sun over 30 years.

When it comes to estimating the mass of the universe, one of the biggest problems is that current methods have produced conflicting results.

Some are even challenging the standard model of cosmology: just last month, astronomers were left scratching their heads after research found that our galaxy could be one-fifth as heavy as previously thought.

“If we count the amount of natural matter in the universe – the atoms of which we are all composed – more than half of what should be there today is missing,” said Ryan Shannon, co-author of the latest study. Study and professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

“We think the missing matter is hiding in intergalactic space, but it may be so hot and diffuse that it is impossible to see using normal techniques.”

He added: “Fast radio bursts sense this ionized matter. Even in space that is almost completely empty, they can ‘see’ all the electrons, and this allows us to measure the amount of stuff that exists between galaxies.”

The most distant FRB, named FRB 20220610A, was discovered in June last year by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia and confirmed with the help of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

It broke the research team’s previous record by 50 percent.

“Using the ASKAP dish array, we were able to pinpoint the source of the explosion,” said co-author Stuart Ryder, an astronomer from Macquarie University in Australia.

“We then used ESO’s VLT in Chile to search for the source galaxy, and found that it is older and more distant than any other FRB found so far and is likely within a small group of merged galaxies.”

Finding distant FRBs is the key to accurately measuring the missing matter in the universe, as the late Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre (JP) Macquart discovered in 2020, researchers say.

“JP showed that the farther away the fast radio burst is, the more gas spreads between galaxies. This is now known as the Macquart relationship,” Ryder said.

Some recent fast radio bursts seem to have broken this relationship. Our measurements confirm that Macquart’s relationship applies beyond half of the known universe.

Fellow researcher Shannon added: “While we still don’t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are common events in the universe and that we will be able to use them to detect intergalactic matter, and better understand the structure of the universe.”

With the recent discovery of the FRB, astronomers have essentially reached the limit of what can be detected with current telescopes.

However, they hope that the construction of two new observatories – the International Square Kilometer Array Observatory in South Africa and Australia, and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert – will change that.

These observatories should be able to find thousands of other fast radio bursts, including very distant ones beyond FRB 20220610A that are currently undetectable with current equipment.

The new study was published in the journal Sciences.