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Feb. 16, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
17:10
Special Edition - What's This New Repeating Space Signal?
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Hello again, it's Howard in London at the Home of the Unexplained.
www.theunexplained.tv and whatever portal that you get these shows.
Two reasons for popping in with a special edition of The Unexplained here.
It's just a short edition, so none of the bells and whistles, but this one is important, I think.
Two things I wanted to do.
Number one, I wanted to thank you so much for all of the kind messages that you've sent me, not only through my website, theunexplained.tv, but also through the Facebook page, The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, about the fact that I've been mowed down with some kind of virus for about five or six days now.
It started, it actually started late on Saturday night, and it came on within about an hour.
Started with the sore throat, a bad one that came on immediately, and then all of the bells and whistles, and by Sunday, I just couldn't move.
And I've stayed like that for much of this week.
And I missed two radio shows during the week, which financially for me is an absolute disaster.
You know how that feels with bills coming in.
That's terrible news.
But I wasn't able to do a thing.
So I haven't had anything like that for a very, very long time.
If you've got that, you have my total sympathy.
And if you think you have, then please look after yourself.
Thank you for your suggestions and the lovely things that you said during the week.
I've been trying Manuka Honey Ekanesha.
What else have I tried?
I've tried the odd glass of whiskey, I have to say.
I had some whiskey in, so I think that soothed things.
I don't know whether it did anything medicinal, but it made me feel better for a little while.
And what else did I do?
Chicken soup was all I could eat.
I've got chicken soup.
I keep cans of it in, just for emergencies.
So I've been through my stock of chicken soup, and it's only now that I can get some kind of voice going again.
And I know I sound a little bit bunged up, but it's nice to be back in this position and not where I was yesterday, the day before that, and the day before that.
So that's explaining that, and thanking you very sincerely for being such friends to me and sending me messages through this.
The other thing is the story that while I've been laid up and occasionally checking my phone that you've been sending me, this fast radio burst that's made the news this last week or so.
This is one version of the story.
A mysterious object 500 million light years away has been discovered transmitting signals toward Earth in a repeating pattern and researchers can't figure out why.
That's my kind of story.
The pattern is something like every 16 days, but it's regular and they haven't seen a fast radio burst, an FRB like that before.
When there's a story like that, I have to do it.
So the person that I've just spoken with is our old friend Seth Szostak from SETI, who knows all about these things.
So on this special edition of The Unexplained and the next edition of The Unexplained 431, I think you're going to like a lot.
So check out, I think probably appearing today, or maybe in a day or so, appearing very, very soon.
That's about Mars and potential life on Mars.
But what a great story you will hear in edition 431.
But let's hear now our friend Seth Szostak from SETI talking about this fast radio burst.
Seth, thank you for doing this.
So this is the big one then.
Well, maybe it's the big one.
I assume you're referring to this latest fast radio burst?
Yeah, one that repeats every 16.35 days, apparently.
Yes.
Well, that makes it particularly choice, I would say.
We've found, I don't know, upwards of 50 or 60 fast radio bursts or FRBs since they were first found in, what, 2007?
So it's been more than a dozen years now.
But only three of those have the really attractive quality that they repeat.
And if they repeat, that means you can observe them more than once.
You can use different instruments on them and you might find out something interesting about them.
Okay.
The story about this, apparently, though, is that it repeats every 16.35 days and it repeats when it does repeat in quite a systematic way.
It's not random.
It's not erratic.
No, that's true.
That's true.
And I think, honestly, that this particular FRB, and these things have been kind of a mystery now ever since they were first found, because, you know, they tend to be, I mean, they're very short, little burps, radio burps on the sky.
And, you know, the three that we have some distance measurement for are very far away.
I mean, this latest one with a 16-day period, it's 500 million light years away.
I mean, that's a long ride.
That's really far away.
And the others are more than a billion light years away.
So these things are very, very far away.
And the fact that you can pick them up with an antenna in Canada, even from billions of light years, means that whatever is making these babies has to be incredibly energetic.
I mean, there's a lot of power involved in that thing.
But the fact that this one repeats on such a regular basis, I think that makes this one the Rosetta Stone.
And within a year, the theoreticians are going to figure out what these are.
Now, we know that distance is linked to duration when we look at space.
So something from that far away that repeats itself every 16.35 days, how long would that thing take to get here?
Well, it's 500, this particular one, it's 500 million light years away.
It's been tracked back down, tracked back, I should say, to a galaxy.
It looks like kind of an ordinary spiral galaxy.
There are plenty of them out there.
Our own Milky Way is kind of a spiral galaxy, although a little different.
It has a bar.
But in any case, so it's coming from somebody's galaxy.
Well, no surprise there.
But it's 500 billion light years away.
We don't know exactly where in that galaxy because it's so far away.
Can't zero in on it entirely.
But the fact that it's every 16 days, that it repeats like that, suggests to me, and I suspect to most astronomers, that it's being produced by something that's in orbit, right?
Something that goes around something else every 16 days.
Right.
So if you were to put, I don't know, if you were to put a bad example, but a big brick or a tile in front of a torch and then revolve the torch around the brick or the tile, every so often you'd see it.
You think that's what's happening with this?
Could be.
I mean, you know, without really knowing, we come up with all sorts of, you know, scenarios for what are producing these fast radio bursts.
And in the beginning, it was thought, these things have got to be so energetic that they have to involve something like collisions between black holes or neutron stars.
Neutron stars are just dead stars.
If you smash two black holes together, I don't know how often you do that, but if you do, you get a lot of energy out.
These things are very energetic and very short, like an eye blink, like that.
And maybe that's what's causing them.
But if you have something that's repeating every 16 days, that's not black holes colliding.
I mean, yeah, they collide once, but you can't back them up and then have them collide again 16 days later.
So that's why it suggests something in orbit, like you say, a torch and a brick, maybe, or maybe one of these two objects might be a black hole and, you know, it's sucking material off whatever the other object is, some sort of star, who knows?
And every now and again, that, you know, that sucked out gas produces a lot of radio noise that impinges on this Canadian telescope.
Okay, well, for many reasons, this story has grabbed people's attention this week.
The latest article I saw about this was on an entertainment website, so it's even made the entertainment news.
Why do you think people are so captivated by this?
Well, you know, it's another mystery in the sky, and as is the case for almost all new discoveries in astronomy, the aliens get to blame, at least from some quarters, right?
When pulsars were first found in the countryside of England back in the mid-1960s, well, they weren't actually there in the countryside.
They were found by telescopes that were in the countryside.
But in any case, you know, they were very regular radio emitters, you know, you know, it was like a clock, and people thought, well, that can't be anything natural.
That's clearly little green men.
And that's what the Cambridge astronomers called them for a while.
But then within two years, they found a couple of more, and then they decided they knew what they were, and they're not little green men.
But little green men or big green men or any other color men often get the blame for new discoveries in astronomy.
And I think that that's why this thing, which is every 16 days, you know, sounds very regular, sounds artificial.
To many people, this is an example of aliens trying to get in touch.
So what do we do here on Earth about this?
Do we just sit and wait, see if something else happens?
Do we wait for it to signal, come home, trigger, all is forgiven?
What do we do?
Trigger.
Well, I don't know.
You'd give it some hay or something.
Well, in fact, you continue to look at it.
Look, if it's predictable, if you know that 16 days from now, it's going to burp again.
Obviously, the telescope that was used to find it, which is this thing, the so-called chime telescope up in British Columbia, you know, in nearby Canada, that will continue to look at it.
But every other big radio telescope in the world, I'm sure, has people clamoring to use it 16 days from the last burp to look at it again.
And ordinary, if you will, telescopes with mirrors and lenses, you want to train those on this object too, because you want to see, well, is there any light flash that corresponds to the radio flash?
I mean, you want to know what it is.
You want to know what it is.
It's a mystery.
It's like a noise in the attic.
And if you hear it on a regular basis, you know, you have an incentive to go up there and check it out.
Well, it's rather like that dripping, isn't it, from, I don't know, the water storage tank in the roof space, if you've got one of those.
Even though it's so tiny and it doesn't happen very often, once you become aware of it, you have to do something about it.
So I'm just wondering, you know, what, as explorers, as people who are interested in this thing, do we keep our sights focused on this?
Do we start looking in other places that aren't very far away from that?
You know, does this go to the top of the agenda?
Well, I think that fast radio bursts, I mean, you know, astronomy always has mysteries you're trying to solve.
That's the nature of it.
People get paid to be an astronomer, not to go look at the moon every night and say, oh, guess what, Bob?
It's still there.
I mean, you know, that's not terribly interesting.
Nobody's going to pay you to do that.
But if you find something new, then maybe somebody will pay you.
So they're always looking for new things.
But in this case, the advantage of this thing is if it's really the Rosetta Stone, as I've called it here, for fast radio bursts, of course you will continue to study this thing.
But that doesn't mean that, for example, the CHIME telescope there in Canada is going to not look for other ones.
I mean, it's found lots.
It's built a whole reputation.
The thing's probably gold-plated by now by grateful astronomers who've gotten a modest career out of these things.
It's their first big story of 2020.
Okay, so there it is, emitting every 16.35 days.
One of the many sages and scientists I've seen commenting about this this week said it couldn't possibly be from some kind of civilization, because if it was from some kind of civilization, they would repeat the message more frequently than 16.35 days.
I thought, I don't know what you think, that misses a very big point.
They might exist on a different time scale.
They might be very, very slow.
Yes, like my neighbors.
Well, that's true.
That could be.
That could be.
I don't think that the fact that it's every 16 days is an argument against it being due to aliens trying to get in touch.
I think you can make another argument, though.
And in fact, two other arguments.
I'll make them very briefly.
One is, okay, so this thing is coming from whatever is making these bursts is, isn't this galaxy 500 million light years away?
But we know the distances to two other fast radio bursts because they also repeat, not as regularly, but they do repeat.
And one of those is 3 billion light years away in that other direction over there.
And then the third one is 1.
I think it's 3 billion light years over in that direction.
Now, how could these guys all be coordinated to do basically the same thing, right, if they're separated by billions of light years?
I mean, to send a memo from one to the next, hey, you Klingon guys, we want you to belch a radio into space, you know, for a tenth of a second every 16 days.
I mean, there's no way you could, you know, communicate that in less than billions of years.
And by the time the memo got to them, they couldn't read the memo because they're no longer, you know, Klingons.
I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
Honestly, it doesn't.
And the other thing to keep in mind is these things are very short when they do burst.
You know, they're a fraction of a second.
They really are like eye blinks.
And it was proven back in the 1940s that if you have a very short transmission, you can't get much information into it, right?
Imagine if your radio show was only a tenth of a second long, you know, it wouldn't be terribly interesting.
There were some people who are wishing for that day, but that's another thought.
Yes.
So, I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, the aliens are really trying to say something.
They're not going to make a transmission of a tenth of a second.
So it's interesting.
We watch it, but we keep looking for other things.
Yes, always, always.
Okay, before you go, I know that where you're based is very close to the headquarters of Google.
And you were telling me before we started recording this that you keep seeing driverless cars being tested.
What's going on there?
Well, self-driving cars, as they are called, are being tested by subsidiaries of Google and other companies.
I'm, you know, here in the Silicon Valley, we're in Mountain View, California, and you can look up Google headquarters.
It's, you know, like, I don't know, two kilometers from where I'm sitting.
And so they put these cars on the roads of Mountain View.
Now, mind you, they're not entirely driverless.
There are always people inside the cars because that's just, you know, the law.
They can't send them out on their own quite yet because they're not considered good enough for that.
So the humans are sitting there.
It must be an incredibly boring job.
You just sit in this car, but you don't really drive it.
You're only there in case something untoward happens and you can take the controls.
My kind of job, that one.
It's like being a mattress tester.
I don't know, but in any case, these cars are all over the place.
But it is the Silicon Valley.
And Google is such a huge employer here in this particular region that it's kind of swallowing the whole town.
The rents are high.
The houses are expensive.
And there are young Googlers everywhere.
It's the price of progress, I think, Seth.
Hey, listen, just back to the fast radio burst.
One quick final question.
I should have asked this.
Now, I've asked you some stupid questions over the years.
So here comes another.
Are we emitting fast radio bursts in the other direction?
From around here?
Yeah, no, well, certainly not here in the U.S. No, we're not.
We do broadcast into space, you know, sort of inadvertently, our television and high-frequency radio, what's called FM radio here in the United States, and radar.
Those are all things that do go right into space.
The low frequency, medium wave, as it's sometimes called in Europe, that doesn't really go into space very well because it gets bent by the ionosphere, so it bounces back to Earth.
But, you know, we are broadcasting into space.
I don't know if the aliens have any interest in watching our television, but they couldn't see it from 3 billion light years away.
I can tell you that.
Not so much because it would be very weak, which it would be, but simply because, you know, 3 billion years is a lot longer than we've been broadcasting.
And as a consequence, the signals that we're sending out into space have not actually gotten very far.
Oh, that sets whole of life and everything into perspective.
Seth, thank you very much for doing that.
You know we will talk again.
Absolutely, Howard.
It's my pleasure.
And my thanks to Seth Szostak for doing that at short notice.
And again, my thanks to you for all of the nice things you've said.
I'm getting my health back now, and it's just nice to be able to get out of bed and feel like a human being again.
I know there are all sorts of things going around at the moment, loads of viruses.
And I'm not just talking about coronavirus, which is making the news, which we've talked about a lot on the radio show and will do again.
But there are just lots of things going around.
And I keep hearing people on the radio who barely speak because they're so sick.
So please, whatever you do, keep using the hand gel because I think that's reassuring.
I am Mr. Handgel.
And just be careful out there.
And if you feel that you're ill, then look after yourself in all the ways that you've suggested to me during this last week.
And I've taken all of your tips on board.
Thank you very much.
Okay, The Unexplained continues.
The next regular edition appears soon.
That'll be edition 431, like I said.
And until next we meet, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
Above all, like you have been, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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