Are aliens using a planet-sized power system to propel their ships through interstellar space? It appears to be a wild idea but some astronomers are taking it seriously.
They have based their assumption on mysterious fast radio bursts. Since their discovery ten years ago, fast radio bursts have mystified astronomers. These pulses of radio energy have defied explanation, but a new theory suggests these pulses have technological origin.
According to this theory aliens may be using these beams to propel their ships through space. Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have suggested that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are produced by advanced alien civilisations in order to drive spacecraft through interstellar space. Many of us will dismiss this idea as a science fiction stuff, but it’s an idea worth pursuing given the nature of these bursts.
Fast radio bursts were first detected in 2007 at the Parkes radio dish in Australia. To date, only 17 episodes of these millisecond-long flashes of radio energy have ever been recorded by astronomers. The cause of this enigma isn’t known, but scientists have suggested various cosmological phenomena, including supermassive neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, and stellar flares as possible sources of these energy bursts. Astronomers are fairly certain FRBs are coming from galaxy far, far away. They are travelling billions of light years to reach our telescope. The idea is that FRBs come from an immense alien power plant that is used to propel ships using light sails. A powerful beam of light can propel a reflective surface in the vacuum of space, which is the basis for light sail technology.
Current human light sail experiments use light from the sun, but scientists are also working to develop a worldwide system of lasers that could propel small nanoprobes to about 20 percent the speed of light. Such technology, called photonic propulsion, could send a probe to Alpha Centauri, our neighboring star system, in roughly 20 years. It is possible that a more advanced alien species uses photonic propulsion to power much larger spaceships. Loeb and Lingam found that if an object twice the size of the Earth were harnessing solar power and converting the energy into a laser beam to propel spacecraft, then the radio emissions from it would be detectable even across billions of light-years.
Such a planet-sized power system would be capable of accelerating a spaceship weighing a million tons, which is about 20 times bigger than the biggest cruise ships. It is big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances," says Lingam. Of course, this is all highly speculative theory. The new study simply outlines the fact that it is possible that FRBs are from an alien propulsion system according to our current laws of physics. We are nowhere near achieving such advanced technology, but perhaps a more advanced race has unlocked large-scale interstellar travel.
When asked whether he really believes FRBs come from an advanced alien civilisation, Loeb said: "Science isn't a matter of belief, it's a matter of evidence. It's worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge. Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a possible natural source with any confidence. An artificial origin is worth checking.”
[ Image : An artist's illustration of a light-sail powered by a
radio beam generated on the surface of a planet ]
