Mysterious Signals Detected From Another Galaxy

In a galaxy far far away, there just may be extraterrestrial life.

A series of mysterious signals have been picked up by astronomers, the New York Post reported. The 15 “fast radio burst” (FRB) signals are being emitted from a tiny dwarf galaxy more than three billion lightyears away, and because they are being labeled as a “repeater,” the possibility of the cause being something such as a star exploding has been ruled out.

FRB 121102, which is what the source of the transmissions is being called, was discovered by Breakthrough Listen, a global astronomical initiative launched by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking in 2015.

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“Attempts to understand the mechanism that generates FRBs have made this galaxy a target of ongoing monitoring campaigns by instruments across the globe,” Breakthrough Listen wrote in a press release. “Possible explanations for FRBs range from outbursts from rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, to more speculative ideas that they are directed energy sources used by extraterrestrial civilizations to power spacecraft.”

Even if the transmissions are being emitted from extraterrestrials, alien believers shouldn’t get their hopes up. Due to the distance between our galaxy and the host galaxy, the likelihood of ever contacting these possible extraterrestrials is slim to none, not to mention the fact that the pulses that are being picked up are billions of years old.

“When the recently-detected pulses left their host galaxy our entire Solar System was just 2 billion years old. Life on Earth consisted of only single-celled organisms and it would be another billion years before even the simplest multicellular life began to evolve,” Breakthrough Listen stated.