Science Tips Tips Tricks Technology More ‘fast radio bursts’ have been detected from a distant galaxy. This one has a repeating pattern.

More unexplained signals are coming from outer space, scientists report in a new study.

For only the second time ever, scientists have detected a radio signal from a distant galaxy that repeats at regular intervals.

The series of “fast radio bursts” – short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe – were detected for 90 days then stopped for a period of 67 days. 

The same start-and-stop pattern then repeated every 157 days.

Kaustubh Rajwade of the University of Manchester in the U.K., who led the new research, said in a statement: “This is an exciting result as it is only the second system where we believe we see this modulation in burst activity. Detecting a periodicity provides an important constraint on the origin of the bursts.”

This discovery provides an important clue to identifying the origin of these enigmatic bursts, which come from a dwarf galaxy that’s some 3 billion light-years away from Earth.  

The presence of a regular sequence in the burst activity could imply that the powerful bursts are linked to the orbital motion of a massive star, a neutron star or a black hole, according to the University of Manchester. 

First discovered in 2007, fast radio bursts last only a few milliseconds, which makes it difficult to accurately determine where they come from.

“One of the greatest mysteries in astronomy right now is the origin of short, dramatic bursts of radio light seen across the universe,” the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy said in a statement earlier this year. 

“Although they last for only a thousandth of a second, there are now hundreds of records of these enigmatic sources,” the institute said.

Could it be aliens? Almost certainly not, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in a recent statement: “The signals are a sign of energetic events that are on the extreme scale of the cosmos. Even a highly intelligent species would be very unlikely to produce energies like this. And there is no detectable pattern so far that would suggest there’s a sentient hand at play.”

Speaking about the new research, study co-author Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University said that “this exciting discovery highlights how little we know about the origin of fast radio bursts.”

The study was published Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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