SCIENTISTS in Canada have just revealed they have detected eight new repeating Fast Radio Bursts.

In the world of radio astronomy, they are going slightly gaga at the find, which was made using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope.

Is it a naturally occurring phenomenon or did someone – or something – many years ago send out a radio signal in the hope that another life form might detect it? In short, did we just get a phone call from deep space?

WHAT’S A FAST RADIO BURST?

A FAST Radio Burst, or FRB for short, is a radio pulse of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds. They are caused way out in space by some process we poor humans can’t quite understand. Given the distances they travel across space, they involve huge energy outputs.

They were first discovered by Professor Duncan Lorimer, below, of West Virginia University, in 2007 when he and student David Narkevic were looking through the archives of a survey on pulsars, which themselves were only discovered in 1967 by Dame Jocelyn Joyce Burnell.

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Pulsars are white dwarf or neutron stars which emit electromagnetic radiation in pulses, hence the name, and back in 2007, Lorimer and Narkevic combed through all the pulsar data to show there was a different kind of radio pulse in among all the observations.

Most FRBs were then found in existing data and it was only in 2015 that an FRB was observed “live” so to speak.

Now astronomers in Canada using CHIME have found eight repeating FRBs – the same radio burst was repeated over and over.

Repeating FRBs were first discovered in 2012, but this is the largest discovery by far and could supply real clues as to the mysterious origin of the FRBs.

WHO IS HEARING THEM?

A TEAM of astronomers led by Bridget C Andersen of McGill University in Montreal made the discovery using CHIME, which is itself a collaboration involving

50 scientists from the University of British Columbia, McGill, the University of Toronto, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the National Research Council of Canada.

CHIME has given Canada the lead in this field. Perimeter Institute’s Kendrick Smith explained: “CHIME reconstructs the image of the overhead sky by processing the radio signals recorded by thousands of antennas with a large signal processing system.”

CHIME’s signal processing system is the largest of any telescope on Earth, allowing it to search huge regions of the sky simultaneously.

The co-operative Canadians found only the second repeating FRB late last year. Now they have found these eight and that has led to all sort of speculation, mostly of the variety: “If they’re repeating the same FRB, isn’t that a sign of intelligent life using a sort of Morse code to attract attention?”

WHAT’S THE THINKING SO FAR?

ASTROPHYSICISTS are baffled as to the origin of FRBs. Some speculate that because of the intense energy in an FRB, they could be the result of dying neutron stars. Others say a type of star known as a magnetar is emitting them, and yes, the possibility that they are sent by intelligent life has absolutely not been discounted.

Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, said: “The first biggest conclusion [from the paper] is that this is not an anomalous phenomenon. This is for real.

“It just takes time and patience to find them. And two, it offers the opportunity to localise them, and that’s huge in the FRB field.”

Pragya Chawla, co-author of the paper and a PhD student at the McGill Space Institute, said: “Discovering eight sources like this is so important because it says we have a lot more repeating FRBs and can figure out the environments and the galaxies these FRBs are located in if we follow them up with other telescopes.”

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SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT POTENTIAL INVASION?

NO, because even if they are sourced to intelligent life, the FRBs are coming from outside our galaxy, so if any beings were daft enough to want to come to Earth, they would find it impossible to travel those distances – at least as far as we know. You’re better off worrying about killer asteroids.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, KILLER ASTEROIDS?

ENTREPRENEUR and tech geek Elon Musk, above, summed it up the other day when he tweeted that a huge asteroid will eventually hit the Earth, probably destroying all life on the planet, and we have no defence at this time.

We do know that on April 13, 2029, an asteroid called 99942 Apophis will come uncomfortably close to Earth but should miss. At 1100ft wide it will be visible to the naked eye.