How a Russian billionaire looking for aliens helps to uncover one of the greatest mysteries of the universe

For more than ten years, astronomers have been at a loss about space flares, whose energy is comparable to 500 suns. Today, they teamed up with alien hunters to solve these mysteries once and for all.

In the spring of 2007, David Narkevich, a physics student at the University of West Virginia, sifted through mountains of data dumped by a telescope from the Parks Observatory - a radio telescope located in Australia, and tracking the behavior of pulsars, rapidly rotating nuclei of once massive stars. His curator, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, asked him to look in the data for information on ultra-fast pulsars of the recently discovered RRAT type. However, in these mountains of data, Narkevich discovered a strange signal coming from the side of the galaxy close to us, the Small Magellanic Cloud .



The signal was not like anything seen by Lorimer earlier. And although it appeared for short periods of time, only five milliseconds, it was billions of times brighter than the usual pulsar that can be found in the Milky Way. In a millisecond, it radiated as much energy as the Sun in a month.



The discovery of Narkevich and Lorimer was the first of many discoveries of strange ultra-powerful flashes discovered by our telescopes. For several years, such outbreaks were considered either unlikely or disappearing rare. But to date, researchers have already recorded more than 80 such " fast radio bursts, " or FRB [Fast Radio Bursts]. At first, astronomers thought that the first phenomenon that they dubbed the “Lorimer surge” was unique in its kind, but now they believe that one FRB is likely to occur in the Universe every second.



What is the reason for such a sudden overabundance of discoveries? Aliens. Well, not the aliens themselves, but their quest. Among the crowds of astronomers and researchers, tirelessly revealing these mysterious signals, stands out a Russian businessman based in the United States, who, as a result of his search for alien life, has funded one of the most complex and deep reviews of the Universe of all time.



From the moment that Narkevich discovered the first surge, scientists were interested in what exactly could give out these bewitching flashes in deep space. The list of possible sources turned out to be long, and contains assumptions from theoretical to incomprehensible: collision of black holes, white holes, fusion of neutron stars, exploding stars, dark matter, rapidly rotating magnetars, incorrectly behaving microwaves.



Although some of these theories can already be rejected today, the rest remain relevant. Finally, almost ten years after the start of the search, a new generation of telescopes is beginning to appear, which can help researchers understand the mechanism underlying these superpower bursts. Two recent works that have been consistently developing this topic describe how two different telescope arrays - ASKAP and DSA (deep synoptic array) from Owens Valley Observatory - first discovered the exact location of two of these mysterious FRBs. Now physicists are expecting two more telescopes - the Canadian CHIME and the South African MeerKAT - to finally be able to tell us exactly what these powerful radio bursts showed.





Parks Observatory Radio Telescope



However, the discovery of Narkevich and Lorimer was nearly sent to the trash. A few months after they first noticed an unusually bright surge, it seemed that this discovery would not go beyond the walls of the office of Lorimer, located on the banks of the Monongahila River, which cuts the city of Morgantown in West Virginia.



Shortly after the burst was discovered, Lorimer asked his former curator Matthew Bales, an astronomer from Swinburne University in Melbourne, to help him mark this signal - now an energy peak widely known among astronomers, rising much higher than bursts of any of the known pulsars. That surge seemed to come to us from a much deeper cosmos compared to the places where the Parks telescope usually found pulsars; in this case, it was probably another galaxy, possibly located billions of light years from us.



“He was beautiful. He seemed amazing. “We almost fell out of chairs,” Bailes recalls. “I couldn’t fall asleep that evening, because I was thinking that if this thing is really located so far and it is so bright, then this would be an amazing discovery. But it would be better if we were not mistaken. ”



Within a few weeks, Lorimer and Bales scribbled a job, sent it to Nature - and quickly received a refusal. The editor of the magazine doubted on the basis that this event was single, and looked much brighter than it seemed possible. Bales was upset, but he had worse situations. Sixteen years earlier, he and his colleague-astronomer, Andrew Lyne, had submitted a paper for review, where they announced the discovery of the first planet in orbit around another star - and not just a star, but a pulsar. The scientific discovery turned out to be a malfunction in the readings of their telescope. A few months later, Lyne had to speak to a large audience at a conference of the American Astronomical Society and announce their mistake. “It's science, anything can happen,” says Bales. This time, Bales and Lorimer were sure that they did everything right, and decided to send their work on FRB to another journal, Science.



After its publication, the work immediately attracted great interest; some scholars wondered if this outbreak was an attempt by aliens to establish a connection. Scientists have turned to alien life in search of a solution to unexplained signals not for the first time; in 1967, when researchers discovered a phenomenon that later turned out to be the first pulsar found, they also wondered if it could be a sign of intelligent life.



Like Narkevich a few decades later, Cambridge graduate student Jocelyn Bell came across a mysterious signal in the mountains of data collected by an array of radio telescopes in Cambridgeshire. Today, almost nothing remains of this array; in the fields of the university where he was now there is now an overgrown hedge, in which shaky dull columns are lost that were once entangled in a web of copper wires that trap radio waves from distant sources. Wires have long been stolen and handed over for scrap.



“We were seriously considering the possibility that they were aliens,” said Bell, now professor emeritus at Oxford. The first pulsar is spectacular, and half in jest, called LGM-1 (little green men - green men). She only had six months to defend her doctorate, and she was not very happy that “some crowd of green men” was using her telescope and her frequency to send signals to Earth. Why would aliens “use such a strange technology to signal an inconspicuous planet?” She once wrote in an article for Cosmic Search Magazine.



However, just a few weeks later, Bell discovered a second pulsar, and then a third one, just after the engagement in January 1968. Then, while she was defending her doctorate, a few days before the wedding, she found a fourth signal in another part of the sky. This proved that pulsars should be a natural phenomenon of astrophysical origin, and not signals of intelligent life. Each new signal detected reduced the likelihood that intelligent aliens, separated by vast expanses of space, somehow coordinated their efforts to send messages to an uninteresting piece of stone on the outskirts of the Milky Way.



Lorimer was so unlucky. After the discovery of the first surge, six years passed without any signs of recurrence. Many scientists have begun to lose interest in this. For a while, a microwave explanation stuck, Lorimer says, and skeptics were distrustful of the outburst they had discovered only once. The situation was also not helped by the fact that in 2010 Parks discovered 16 similar bursts, which, as they quickly found out, appeared in the data as a result of opening the door of a microwave in one of the laboratories operating in the heating mode.





Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg at the 2017 Breakthrough Prize Prize Awards



When Avi Labe first heard about Lorimer's unusual discovery, he also thought that this could be the result of wiring problems or incorrect computer settings. He was the chair of the astronomy department in Melbourne in November 2007, just as the work of Lorimer and Bales appeared in the journal Science, so he had the opportunity to discuss this strange outburst with Bales. Labe found this radio surge an intriguing mystery, but nothing more.



However, in the same year, Leib wrote a theoretical work that claimed that radio telescopes built to recognize special hydrogen emissions occurring in the early stages of the development of the Universe should also be able to receive radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations located up to ten light-years from us. “We’ve been broadcasting for a century - so another civilization with the same arrays will be able to see us at a distance of up to 50 light-years,” said Leib. Then he published another work on the search for artificial light sources in the solar system. In it, Leib showed that a city comparable in brightness to Tokyo could be detected using the Hubble telescope, even if this city was located on the edge of the solar system. In another work, he described the technology for recognizing industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres.



Ever since Leib was a boy growing up in Israel, he has been passionate about life - on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. “Now in astronomy everyone is looking for microbial life - people are looking for chemical signs of primitive life in the atmosphere of exoplanets,” says Leib, before getting a degree in physics, carried away by philosophy.



However, everything in a row should also be engaged in the search for intelligent life outside the Earth, he says. “People have a taboo, a psychological and sociological problem. And all because of the baggage of science fiction and reports of flying saucers that have nothing to do with what is happening in space, ”he adds. He is annoyed that he has to explain and defend his point of view. Indeed, in search of dark matter, he says, billions have been swelled over decades, with zero result. Can the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, known as SETI, be considered an even stranger event than the search for dark matter?



Lorimer did not particularly follow Leib’s work on SETI. Good luck turned to him in 2013, after six long and disappointing years when a group of his colleagues, including Bales, found four more bright radio bursts in Parks data. Lorimer felt relieved to realize that he had been rehabilitated. This was followed by even more discoveries: finally, it was confirmed that FRB is a real phenomenon. After the first event was called the “Lorimer surge”, it quickly penetrated the physical and astronomical circles of universities around the world. In physical circles, Lorimer was elevated to the position of a small celebrity.



All of this from a distance was watched by Leib. One day in February 2014, at a dinner in Boston, he talked to a charismatic Russian named Yuri Milner , a billionaire and technology investor who had a physical education and was famous in Silicon Valley. Milner, as far as he remembered, was always interested in life outside the Earth, and on this subject he and Leib became close; the couple quickly found a common language.



Milner met with Leib again in May next year, at Harvard, and asked the scientist how long it would take to get to Alpha Centauri , the closest star system to Earth. Leib said that it would take him six months to determine the technology that would allow people to reach the stars throughout their lives. Milner then asked Leib to familiarize himself with the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, one of five initiatives that the Russian businessman was about to announce in a few weeks. He supported these initiatives with his own money in the amount of $ 100 million, and all of them were supposed to help the SETI project.



Six months later, at the end of December 2015, Leibu called and asked to prepare a presentation, which would briefly describe his recommended technology for flying to Alpha Centauri. Leib was in Israel at that moment, and was going to leave for the weekend on a goat farm in the southern part of the country. “The next morning, I was sitting in the lobby of the farm - in the only place where I got the Internet - and made a presentation in PowerPoint describing the technology of solar sail for the Yuri project,” says Leib. He showed her at Milner’s house in Moscow two weeks later, and with fanfare she was announced in July 2015.



Initiatives have been an injection of adrenaline into the vein of the SETI movement - and the largest private injection in search of aliens of all time. One of the five initiative projects is Breakthrough Listen, celebrated, among others, by astronomers Stephen Hawking (now deceased) and British royal astronomer Martin Rhys. Following the plot of the film “Contact” with Jodie Foster, who played an astronomer who received radio broadcasts from aliens (the prototype of her character was astronomer Jill Tarter), the project uses radio telescopes around the world to search for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.



Following the announcement of Breakthrough Initiatives, Milner immediately invested in the deployment of advanced technologies - for example, data warehouses and the installation of new receivers - on existing radio telescopes, including Green Bank in West Virginia and Parks in Australia. Regardless of whether the astronomers using these observatories believed in the existence of alien life, they accepted this investment with open arms. And scientific results were not long in coming.



In August 2015, one of the previously recorded FRBs decided to reappear, and this event hit the headlines of newspapers around the world, as the surge was incredibly powerful, brighter than the burst of Lorimer and all the other FRBs. He was called the “repeater,” and he is also known as the Spitler burst, since it was first discovered by astronomer Laura Spitler from the Radio Astronomy Institute. Max Planck in Germany. In the next few months, bursts occurred repeatedly - not regularly, but often enough for researchers to identify the galaxy that generated them and consider the options for their probable sources - most likely these are young, rapidly rotating neutron stars with an extremely strong magnetic field ( magnetars ).



Localization was performed on the Ultra-Large Antenna Array (VLA) , a group of 27 radio telescopes in New Mexico, flashed in the film Contact. But the Green Bank infrastructure, updated as part of the Breakthrough Listen project, has detected far more recurring outbreaks, says Lorimer. This allowed researchers to study in more detail the galaxy generating them. “This is wonderful - they have a mission to search for extraterrestrial life, but in the process they also demonstrate other results useful to the scientific community,” he adds. Finding FRBs quickly became one of Breakthrough Listen's main tasks.



Repeatedly fixing the work of the repeater has become both a blessing and a nuisance - on the one hand, this eliminated catastrophic models, such as a supernova explosion that generates FRB - after all, such an explosion can happen only once. On the other hand, this only complicated the riddle. The repeater is located in a small galaxy with active star formation - where a neutron star can be born, hence the model of the magnetar. But what about the rest of the FRBs that don't repeat?



Researchers have begun to suspect that there are various types of these bursts, each of which has its own source. At scientific conferences, disputes over what can and cannot be, are still raging, and physicists are willing to discuss possible sources of FRB in corridors and dining rooms. In March 2017, Leib launched a media hype, suggesting that FRB could be the result of the work of extraterrestrial civilizations - solar-powered radio transmitters, huge spaceships moving through galaxies thanks to solar sails.



The fact that Parks belongs to the SETI project is obvious to any visitor. From the stairs rising to the round control tower located under the telescope plate, you can see buttons, doors and walls made in the nostalgic style of the 1960s. And then you enter the control center, filled with modern screens, from where astronomers remotely control the antenna to observe pulsars.



If you go up another floor, there will be a data storage room, where there are entire racks filled with servers with flashing lights. One rack is lit with neon-blue light - it got there thanks to the Breakthrough Listen project, and is part of an ultra-modern recording system that helps astronomers search for any radio signals in a 12-hour data recording - much more signals than were available to them before. Bales, today partly in charge of FRB and partly in the Breakthrough Listen project, smiles and takes a selfie against the background of Milner's servers.





Green Bank Telescope



And although many of the first FRB discoveries were made by veteran telescopes - consisting of one large plate, such as Parks or Green Bank, new telescopes, some of which were created with Breakthrough Listen money, are revolutionizing the field of FRB searches.



In the semi-desert region of South Africa, Karoo, which takes eight hours by car from Cape Town, has an array of 64 plates that constantly monitor space. They are smaller in size than their huge cousins, but work together. This is MeerKAT , another instrument of the growing worldwide network of giant Breakthrough Listen telescopes. Together with a couple of other tools of the next generation, we can hope that this observatory someday, perhaps in the next decade, will allow us to answer the question about the essence of FRB.



“MeerKAT” means “more than KAT,” and is opened after KAT 7 - the Karu antenna array, consisting of 7 antennas - although real meerkats scour the site [in meerkat - meerkat / approx. transl.], as well as donkeys, horses, snakes, scorpions and kudu - antelopes the size of an elk with spiral horns. MeerKAT visitors are advised to wear protective leather boots with metal toes against snakes and scorpions. They are also warned about kudu - they are very zealously protecting the young, and recently even attacked a pickup truck with a guard, turning the car over. There is silence on the radio waves in the MeerKAT region, all visitors must turn off their phones and laptops. The only place where communication works is the underground bunker, shielded by 30 cm thick walls, and a metal door,protecting sensitive antennas from human interference.



MeerKAT is one of the two predecessors of the much larger future radio observatory, SKA - Square Kilometer Array (square kilometer antenna array). Upon completion of SKA, another 131 antennas will appear in Kara. The first plate for SKA has just been sent to MeerKAT from China. The assembly of each antenna will take several weeks, and after that it will take several months to verify that it works as it should. If everything goes according to plan, other plates will be ordered, assembled, and sent to this remote place, which is dominated by brown in the daytime. However, after sunset, MeerKAT cymbals begin to dance from an incredible palette of purple, red and pink colors, when the cymbals greet the Milky Way, stretching its starry band directly above them. Soon, says Bales,MeerKAT will be part of the incredible FRB machine.



There is another predecessor of SKA - Australian ASKAP. In 2007, when Lorimer pondered the refusal from Nature, Ryan Shannon was finishing his doctorate in physics at Cornell University, sharing a room with Laura Spitler, who would later discover a splash of Spitler. Shannon came to the United States from Canada, and grew up in a small town in British Columbia. About an hour's drive from his house was the Dominion Radio Astronomy Observatory (DRAO) - a relatively small institution, in particular involved in the creation of equipment for VLA.



Shannon believes that the DRAO subconsciously seems to have influenced his career choice. It is at DRAO that, in a few years, a completely new CHIME telescope will be built, which will radically affect the nascent field of FRB research. But in 2007 it was not there. Released from Cornell in 2011, Shannon decided not to stay so close to home - "as my mother would like." Instead, he moved to Australia and settled at Swinburne University in the backyards of Melbourne.



Shannon joined the Bales team in 2017 - by then astronomers began to understand why they could not find new FRBs, although they already believed that such outbreaks occur a hundred times a day, if not more. “Our large radio telescopes did not have a wide field of view, they could not see the whole sky - so we missed almost all the FRBs in the first decade after we learned about their existence,” says Shannon.



When he and Bales and the other FRB hunters came across a super-bright follower, the Spitler splash, they realized that there are FRBs that can be detected even without giant telescopes like Parks, and with instruments with a wider field of view. Therefore, they began to build ASKAP - a new observatory, conceived in 2012 and recently completed, located in a sparsely populated Australian area. It boasts 36 plates of radio telescopes with a diameter of 12 m each, and, like MeerKAT, working in unison.



To get to ASKAP, located in the county of Murchison in Western Australia, where very few people live, you first need to fly to Perth, transfer there to a small plane to Murchison, and then squeeze into a tiny single-rotor airplane, or drive for 150 hours on 150 km of dirt roads . “When it rains, the roads are washed away, and you won’t get here,” says Shannon, who had twice traveled to ASKAP to introduce the new telescope to Aboriginal people, built with their permission on their land, and to see with their own eyes the next-generation remote ultra-sensitive radio observatory.



MeerKAT and ASKAP provide the hunt for FRB with two very different technical approaches. Both observatories observe the sky of the southern hemisphere, where the bright core of the Milky Way is visible much better than in the northern one; they complement the old, but very seriously updated observatories, Parks and Arecibo, located in South America. For MeerKAT telescopes, receivers are very sensitive and capable of recognizing extremely distant objects, while for ASKAP receivers are multi-pixel, and are able to provide a much wider field of view, which allows the telescope to more often find FRB.



“ASKAP's plates are less sensitive, but we can see a much larger portion of the sky,” says Shannon. “Therefore, ASKAP will be able to see objects brighter in nature.” Together, these two predecessors will prey on different parts of the FRB population - because in order to “get the big picture, you need to understand the entire population.”



MeerKAT began to record data only in February, and ASKAP has been scanning the Universe in search of FRB for several years. He had already discovered about 30 new bursts; in addition, in a recent work in ScienceShannon and colleagues described in detail a new way to localize bursts despite their short duration - and this is a big and important step towards resolving the issue of what causes this ultra-bright radiation. ASKAP antennas can be imagined as the eye of a fly; they can see a large portion of the sky, capturing as many bursts as possible, but all antennas can be instantly directed in the same direction. In this way, they build a real-time image of the sky and notice the millisecond FRB when their radiation washes the Earth. This was done by Shannon and colleagues, and for the first time they were able to detect a burst, called FRB 180924, and accurately indicate its home galaxy, located several billion light-years from us - and all this in real time.



Another team from the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO), owned by Caltech and located in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, also recently discovered a new surge and tracked it to a source - a galaxy located 7.9 billion light-years from us. Like Shannon, they were able to do this not with a single-telescope telescope, but with an antenna array of ten 4.5-meter diameter antennas called Deep Synoptic Array-10. Antennas work together as a plate with a diameter of one and a half kilometers, and cover an area of ​​the sky, the size of 150 moons. The telescope software processes the amount of information comparable to a DVD every second. This grid is the forerunner of Deep Synoptic Array, which at the time of construction in 2021 will contain 110 plates and will be able to recognize and locate more than 100 FRB annually.



The ASKAP and OVRO teams jointly discovered that they are thought to have a one-time outburst from galaxies very different from the galaxy of the first FBR repeater. In their galaxies, star formation is very rare, approximately the same as in the Milky Way, and this makes them extremely different from the home repeater galaxy, in which stars are born 100 times more often. The discoveries showed that “every galaxy, even as average as our Milky Way, can give out FRB,” says Vikram Ravvi, an astronomer from Caltech, who works as part of the OVRO team.



But also their discoveries mean that the magnetar model, which many have accepted as an explanation for the source of bursts of repeated bursts, does not work for one-time bursts. Perhaps, says Shannon, the ASKAP flare may be the result of the merger of two neutron stars, like the one that two years ago noticed the gravitational wave detectors LIGO and Virgo in the USA and Italy, because the two galaxies are very similar. “It's even a little scary,” says Shannon. One thing is clear, he adds: discoveries show that there are probably several types of FRBs.



In Shannon's hometown of Canada, the joyful excitement associated with CHIME is growing exponentially. It was built at the same time as MeerKAT and ASKAP, but this observatory is very different from them; it has no plates, its antennas are in the form of long buckets, and are designed to capture light. In January, the CHIME team reported the discovery of a second FRB repeater and 12 non-repeating FRBs. It is expected that CHIME will detect much more bursts, and astronomers have hopes for jointly working ASKAP, MeerKAT and CHIME to quickly unravel the true nature of these mysterious radio bursts.



However, do they realize Miller’s dream by successfully completing SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Lorimer says scientists hunting for FRB and pulsars have worked closely with colleagues involved in SETI projects for decades.



After all, in the end, the Leib models describing the alien origin of FRB cannot be rejected at a fundamental level. “The energy levels coincide with what we see during the observations, and there are no contradictions,” says Lorimer. “As part of the development of the scientific method, such ideas definitely need to be encouraged.” He prefers to find the simplest natural explanations of the phenomena that he observes in space - but until we can directly see the sources of these FRBs, all theoretical ideas of a scientific nature have the right to life - are they related to aliens or not.