In spring 2007, David Narkevic, a physics student at West Virginia University, was sifting through reams of data churned out by the Parkes telescope—a dish in Australia that had been tracking pulsars, the collapsed, rapidly spinning cores of once massive stars. His professor, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, had asked him to search for a recently discovered type of ultra-rapid pulsar dubbed RRAT. But buried among the mountain of data, Narkevic found an odd signal that seemed to come from the direction of our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud.
The signal was unlike anything Lorimer had encountered before. Although it flashed only briefly, for just five milliseconds, it was 10 billion times brighter than a typical pulsar in the Milky Way galaxy. It was emitting in a millisecond as much energy as the sun emits in a month.
What Narkevic and Lorimer found was the first of many bizarre, ultra-powerful flashes detected by our telescopes. For years the flashes first seemed either improbable or at least vanishingly rare. But now researchers have observed more than 80 of these Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs. While astronomers once thought that what would be later dubbed the "Lorimer Burst" was a one-off, they now agree that there’s probably one FRB happening somewhere in the universe nearly every second.
And the reason for this sudden glut of discoveries? Aliens. Well, not aliens per se, but the search for them. Among the scores of astronomers and researchers working tirelessly to uncover these enigmatic signals is an eccentric Russian-Israeli billionaire who, in his relentless hunt for extraterrestrial life, has ended up partly bankrolling one of the most complex and far-reaching scans of our universe ever attempted.
Ever since Narkevic spotted the first burst, scientists have been wondering what could produce these mesmerizing flashes in deep space. The list of possible sources is long, ranging from the theoretical to the simply unfathomable: colliding black holes, white holes, merging neutron stars, exploding stars, dark matter, rapidly spinning magnetars, and malfunctioning microwaves have all been proposed as possible sources.
While some theories can now be rejected, many live on. Finally though, after more than a decade of searching, a new generation of telescopes is coming online that could help researchers to understand the mechanism that is producing these ultra-powerful bursts. In two recent back-to-back papers, one published last week and one today, two different arrays of radio antennas—the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array 10 at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) in the US—have for the first time ever been able to precisely locate two different examples of these mysterious one-off FRBs. Physicists are now expecting that two other new telescopes—Chime (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) in Canada and MeerKAT in South Africa—will finally tell us what produces these powerful radio bursts.
But Narkevic’s and Lorimer’s discovery nearly got binned. For a few months after they first spotted the unusually bright burst, it looked like the findings wouldn’t make it any further than Lorimer’s office walls, just beyond the banks of the Monongahela River that slices through the city of Morgantown in West Virginia.
Soon after detecting the burst, Lorimer asked his former graduate adviser Matthew Bailes, an astronomer at Swinburne University in Melbourne, to help him plot the signal—which to astronomers is now a famous and extremely bright energy peak, rising well above the power of any known pulsar. The burst seemed to come from much, much further away than where the Parkes telescope would usually find pulsars; in this case, probably from another galaxy, potentially billions of light-years away.
“It just looked beautiful. I was like, ‘Whoa, that's amazing.' We nearly fell off our chairs,” recalls Bailes. “I had trouble sleeping that night because I thought if this thing is really that far away and that insanely bright, it’s an amazing discovery. But it better be right.”
Within weeks, Lorimer and Bailes crafted a paper and sent it to Nature—and swiftly received a rejection. In a reply, a Nature editor raised concerns that there had been only one event, which appeared way brighter than seemed possible. Bailes was disappointed, but he had been in a worse situation before. Sixteen years earlier, he and fellow astronomer Andrew Lyne had submitted a paper claiming to have spotted the first ever planet orbiting another star—and not just any star but a pulsar. The scientific discovery turned out to be a fluke of their telescope. Months later, Lyne had to stand up in front of a large audience at an American Astronomical Society conference and announce their mistake. “It’s science. Anything can happen,” says Bailes. This time around, Bailes and Lorimer were certain that they had it right and decided to send their FRB paper to another journal, Science.
After it was published, the paper immediately stirred interest; some scientists even wondered whether the mysterious flash was an alien communication. This wasn’t the first time that astronomers had reached for aliens as the answer for a seemingly inexplicable signal from space; in 1967, when researchers detected what turned out to be the first pulsar, they also wondered whether it could be a sign of intelligent life.
Just like Narkevic decades later, Cambridge graduate student Jocelyn Bell had stumbled across a startling signal in the reams of data gathered by a radio array in rural Cambridgeshire. Not much of the array is left today; in the fields near the university where it once stood, there’s an overgrown hedge, hiding a collection of wonky, sad-looking wooden poles that were once covered in a web of copper wire designed to detect radio waves from faraway sources. The wire has long been stolen and sold on to scrap metal dealers.
“We did seriously consider the possibility of aliens,” Bell says, now an emeritus professor at Oxford University. Tellingly, the first pulsar was half-jokingly dubbed LGM-1 —for little green men. With only half a year left until the defense of her PhD thesis, she was less than thrilled that “some silly lot of little green men” were using her telescope and her frequency to signal to planet Earth. Why would aliens “be using a daft technique signaling to what was probably still a rather inconspicuous planet?” she once wrote in an article for Cosmic Search Magazine.
Just a few weeks later, however, Bell spotted a second pulsar, and then a third just as she got engaged, in January 1968. Then, as she was defending her thesis and days before her wedding, she discovered a fourth signal in yet another part of the sky. Proof that pulsars had to be a natural phenomenon of an astrophysical origin, not a signal from intelligent life. Each new signal made the prospect even more unlikely that groups of aliens, separated by the vastness of the space, were somehow coordinating their efforts to send a message to an uninteresting hunk of rock on the outskirts of the Milky Way.
Lorimer wasn’t so lucky. After the first burst, six years would pass without another detection. Many scientists began to lose interest. The microwave explanation persisted for a while, says Lorimer, as skeptics sneered at the notion of finding a burst that was observed only once. It didn’t help that in 2010 Parkes detected 16 similar pulses, which were quickly proven to be indeed caused by the door of a nearby microwave oven that had been opened suddenly during its heating cycle.
When Avi Loeb first read of Lorimer’s unusual discovery, he too wondered if it was nothing more than the result of some errant wiring or miscalibrated computer. The chair of the astronomy department at Harvard happened to be in Melbourne in November 2007, just as Lorimer’s and Bailes’ paper appeared in Science, so he had a chance to discuss the odd burst with Bailes. Loeb thought the radio flash was a compelling enigma—but not much more than that.
Still, that same year Loeb wrote a theoretical paper arguing that radio telescopes built to detect very specific hydrogen emissions from the early universe would also be able to eavesdrop on radio signals from alien civilizations up to about 10 light-years away. “We have been broadcasting for a century—so another civilization with the same arrays can see us from a distance out to 50 light-years,” was Loeb’s reasoning. He followed up with another paper on the search for artificial lights in the solar system. There, Loeb showed that a city as bright as Tokyo could be detected with the Hubble Space Telescope even if it was located right at the edge of the solar system. In yet another paper he argued how to detect industrial pollution in planetary atmospheres.
Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Israel, Loeb has been fascinated with life—on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. “Currently, the search for microbial life is part of the mainstream in astronomy—people are looking for the chemical fingerprints of primitive life in the atmosphere of exoplanets,” says Loeb, who first dabbled in philosophy before his degree in physics.
But the search for intelligent life beyond Earth should also be part of the mainstream, he argues. “There is a taboo, it’s a psychological and sociological problem that people have. It’s because there is the baggage of science fiction and UFO reports, both of which have nothing to do with what actually goes on out there in space,” he adds. He’s frustrated with having to explain—and defend—his point of view. After all, he says, billions have been poured into the search for dark matter over decades with zero results. Should the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, more commonly known as SETI, be regarded as even more fringe than this fruitless search?
Lorimer didn’t follow Loeb’s SETI papers closely. After six long and frustrating years, his luck turned in 2013, when a group of his colleagues—including Bailes—spotted four other bright radio flashes in Parkes’ data. Lorimer felt vindicated and relieved. More detections followed and the researchers were on a roll: At long last, FRBs had been confirmed as a real thing. After the first event was dubbed "Lorimer’s Burst," it swiftly made it onto the physics and astronomy curricula of universities around the globe. In physics circles, Lorimer was elevated to the position of a minor celebrity.
Keeping an eye on events from a distance was Loeb. One evening in February 2014, at a dinner in Boston, he started chatting to a charismatic Russian-Israeli called Yuri Milner, a billionaire technology investor with a background in physics and a well-known name in Silicon Valley. Ever since he could remember, Milner had been fascinated with life beyond Earth, a subject close to Loeb’s heart; the two instantly hit it off.
Milner came to see Loeb again in May the following year, at Harvard, and asked the academic how long it would take to travel to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to Earth. Loeb replied he would need half a year to identify the technology that would allow humans to get there in their lifetime. Milner then asked Loeb to lead Breakthrough Starshot, one of five Breakthrough Initiatives the Russian-born entrepreneur was about to announce in a few weeks—backed by $100 million of his own money and all designed to support SETI.
Fast-forward six months, and at the end of December 2015 Loeb got a call asking him to prepare a presentation summarizing his recommended technology for the Alpha Centauri trip. Loeb was visiting Israel and about to head on a weekend trip to a goat farm in the southern part of the country. “The following morning, I was sitting next to the reception of the farm—the only location with internet connectivity—and typing the PowerPoint presentation that contemplated a lightsail technology for Yuri’s project,” says Loeb. He presented it at Milner’s home in Moscow two weeks later, and the Breakthrough Initiatives were announced with fanfare in July 2015.
The initiatives were an adrenaline shot in the arm of the SETI movement—the largest ever private cash injection into the search for aliens. One of the five projects is Breakthrough Listen, which was championed, among others, by the famous astronomer Stephen Hawking (who has died since) and British astronomer royal Martin Rees. Echoing the film Contact, with Jodie Foster playing an astronomer listening out for broadcasts from aliens (loosely based on real-life SETI astronomer Jill Tarter), the project uses radio telescopes around the world to look for any signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.
After the Breakthrough Initiatives were announced, Milner’s money quickly got invested into the deployment of cutting-edge technology—such as computer storage and new receivers—at existing radio telescopes, including Green Bank in West Virginia and Parkes in Australia; whether the astronomers using these observatories believed in alien life or not, they welcomed the investment with open arms. It didn’t take long to receive the first scientific returns.
In August 2015 one of the previously spotted FRBs decided to make a repeat appearance, triggering headlines worldwide because it was so incredibly powerful, brighter than the Lorimer Burst and any other FRB. It was dubbed "the repeater" and is also known as the Spitler Burst, because it was first discovered by astronomer Laura Spitler of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. Over the next few months, the burst flashed many more times, not regularly, but often enough to allow researchers to determine its host galaxy and consider its possible source—likely a highly magnetized, young, rapidly spinning neutron star (or magnetar).
This localization was done with the Very Large Array (VLA), a group of 27 radio dishes in New Mexico that feature heavily in the film Contact. But the infrastructure at Green Bank Telescope upgraded by Breakthrough Listen caught the repeating flashes many more times, says Lorimer—allowing researchers to study its host galaxy more in detail. “It’s wonderful—they have a mission to find ET, but along the way they want to show that this is producing other useful results for the scientific community,” he adds. Detecting FRBs has quickly become one of the main objectives of Breakthrough Listen.
Netting the repeater was both a boon and a hindrance—on the one hand, it eliminated models that cataclysmic events such as supernova explosions were causing FRBs; after all, these can happen only once. On the other hand, it deepened the mystery. The repeater lives in a small galaxy with a lot of star formation—the kind of environment where a neutron star could be born, hence the magnetar model. But what about all the other FRBs that don’t repeat?
Researchers started to think that perhaps there were different types of these bursts, each with its own source. Scientific conferences still buzz with talks of mights and might-nots, with physicists eagerly debating possible sources of FRBs in corridors and at conference bars. In March 2017, Loeb caused a media frenzy by suggesting that FRBs could actually be of alien origin—solar-powered radio transmitters that might be interstellar light sails pushing huge spaceships across galaxies.
That Parkes is part of the SETI project is obvious to any visitor. Walking up the flight of stairs to the circular operating tower below the dish, every button, every door, and every wall nostalgically screams 1960s, until you reach the control room full of modern screens where astronomers remotely control the antenna to observe pulsars.
Up another flight of stairs is the data storage room, stacked with columns and columns of computer drives full of blinking lights. One thick column of hard drives is flashing neon blue, put there by Breakthrough Listen as part of a cutting-edge recording system designed to help astronomers search for every possible radio signal in 12 hours of data, much more than ever before. Bailes, who now splits his time between FRB search and Breakthrough Listen, takes a smiling selfie in front of Milner’s drives.
While many early FRB discoveries were made with veteran telescopes—single mega dishes like Parkes and Green Bank—new telescopes, some with the financial backing of Breakthrough Listen, are now revolutionizing the FRB field.
Deep in South African’s semi-desert region of the Karoo, eight hours by car from Cape Town, stands an array of 64 dishes, permanently tracking space. They are much smaller than their mega-dish cousins, and all work in unison. This is MeerKAT, another instrument in Breakthrough Listen's growing worldwide network of giant telescopes. Together with a couple of other next-generation instruments, this observatory might hopefully tell us one day, probably in the next decade, what FRBs really are.
The name MeerKAT means “More KAT,” a follow up to KAT 7, the Karoo Array Telescope of seven antennas—although real meerkats do lurk around the remote site, sharing the space with wild donkeys, horses, snakes, scorpions and kudus, moose-sized mammals with long, spiraling antlers. Visitors to MeerKAT are told to wear safety leather boots with steel toes as a precaution against snakes and scorpions. They're also warned about the kudus, which are very protective of their calves and recently attacked the pickup truck of a security guard, turning him and his car over. Around MeerKAT there is total radio silence; all visitors have to switch off their phones and laptops. The only place with connectivity is an underground "bunker" shielded by 30-centimeter-thick walls and a heavy metal door to protect the sensitive antennas from any human-made interference.
MeerKAT is one of the two precursors to a much bigger future radio observatory—the SKA, or Square Kilometer Array. Once SKA is complete, scientists will have added another 131 antennas in the Karoo. The first SKA dish has just been shipped to the MeerKAT site from China. Each antenna will take several weeks to assemble, followed by a few more months of testing to see whether it actually works the way it should. If all goes well, more will be commissioned, built, and shipped to this faraway place, where during the day the dominant color is brown; as the sun sets, however, the MeerKAT dishes dance in an incredible palette of purples, reds, and pinks, as they welcome the Milky Way stretching its starry path just above. MeerKAT will soon be an incredible FRB machine, says Bailes.
There is another SKA precursor—ASKAP in Australia. Back in 2007, when Lorimer was mulling over the Nature rejection, Ryan Shannon was finishing his PhD in physics at Cornell University in New York—sharing the office with Laura Spitler, who would later discover the Spitler Burst. Shannon had come to the US from Canada, growing up in a small town in British Columbia. About half an hour drive from his home is the Dominion and Radio Astronomical Observatory (DRAO)—a relatively small facility that was involved in building equipment for the VLA.
Subconsciously, says Shannon, DRAO must have impacted his choice of career. And it was at DRAO that a few years later a totally new telescope—Chime—would be built that would greatly impact the nascent field of FRB research. But in 2007 that was still to come. After graduating from Cornell in 2011, Shannon decided not to stay close to home—“something my mum would’ve wanted.” Instead, he moved to Australia and ultimately to Swinburne University on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Shannon joined Bailes’ team in 2017—and by then astronomers had begun to understand why they weren’t detecting more FRBs, even though they were already estimating that these flashes were happening hundreds of times every day, if not more. “Our big radio telescopes don’t have wide fields of view, they can’t see the entire sky—that’s why we missed nearly all FRBs in the first decade of realizing these things exist,” says Shannon.
When he, Bailes, and other FRB hunters saw the ultra-bright repeater, the Spitler Burst, they understood that there were fast radio bursts which could be found even without gigantic telescopes like Parkes, by using instruments that have a wider field of view. So they started building ASKAP—a new observatory conceived in 2012 and recently completed in the remote Australian outback. It sports 36 dishes with a 12-meter diameter each, and just like with MeerKAT, they all work together.
To get to ASKAP, in a very sparsely populated area in the Murchison Shire of Western Australia, one has to first fly to Perth, change for a smaller plane bound for Murchison, then squeeze into a really tiny single propeller plane, or drive for five hours across 150 kilometers of dirt roads. “When it rains, it turns to mud, and you can’t drive there,” says Shannon, who went to the ASKAP site twice, to introduce the local indigenous population to the new telescope constructed—with permission—on their land and see the remote, next-generation ultra-sensitive radio observatory for himself.
MeerKAT and ASKAP bring two very different technological approaches to the hunt for FRBs. Both observatories look at the southern sky, which makes it possible to see the Milky Way’s bright core much better than in the northern hemisphere; they complement old but much upgraded observatories like Parkes and Arecibo in South America. But the MeerKAT dishes have highly sensitive receivers which are able to detect very distant objects, while ASKAP's novel multi-pixel receivers on each dish offer a much wider field of view, enabling the telescope to find nearby FRBs more often.
“ASKAP’s dishes are less sensitive, but we can observe a much larger portion of the sky,” says Shannon. “So ASKAP is going to be able to see things that are usually intrinsically brighter.” Together, the two precursors will be hunting for different parts of the FRB population—since “you want to understand the entire population to know the big picture.”
MeerKAT only started taking data in February, but ASKAP has been busy scanning the universe for FRBs for a few years now. Not only has it already spotted about 30 new bursts, but in a new paper just released in Science, Shannon and colleagues have detailed a new way to localize them despite their short duration, which is a big and important step toward being able to determine what triggers this ultra-bright radiation. Think of ASKAP’s antennas as the eye of a fly; they can scan a wide patch of the sky to spot as many bursts as possible, but the antennas can all be made to point instantly in the same direction. This way, they make an image of the sky in real time, and spot a millisecond-long FRB as it washes over Earth. That’s what Shannon and his colleagues have done, and for the first time ever, managed to net one burst they named FRB 180924 and pinpoint its host galaxy, some 4 billion light-years away, all in real time.
Another team, at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, have also just caught a new burst and traced it back to its source, a galaxy 7.9 billion light years away. And just like Shannon, they didn’t do it with a single dish telescope but a recently built array of 10 4.5-meter antennas called the Deep Synoptic Array-10. The antennas act together like a mile-wide dish to cover an area on the sky the size of 150 full moons. The telescope’s software then processes an amount of data equivalent to a DVD every second. The array is a precursor for the Deep Synoptic Array that, when built by 2021, will sport 110 radio dishes, and may be able to detect and locate more than 100 FRBs every year.
What both ASKAP’s and OVRO’s teams found was that their presumably one-off bursts originated in galaxies very different from the home of the first FRB repeater. Both come from galaxies with very little star formation, similar to the Milky Way and very different from the home of the repeater, where stars are born at a rate of about a hundred times faster. The discoveries show that “every galaxy, even a run-of-the-mill galaxy like our Milky Way, can generate an FRB,” says Vikram Ravi, an astronomer at Caltech and part of the OVRO team.
But the findings also mean that the magnetar model, accepted by many as the source of the repeating burst, does not really work for these one-off flashes. Perhaps, Shannon says, ASKAP’s burst could be the result of a merger of two neutron stars, similar to the one spotted two years ago by the gravitational wave detectors LIGO and Virgo in the US and Italy, because both host galaxies are very similar. “It’s a bit spooky that way,” says Shannon. One thing is clear though, he adds: The findings show that there is likely more than one type of FRBs.
Back in Shannon’s hometown in Canada, the excitement has also been growing exponentially because of CHIME. Constructed at the same time as MeerKAT and ASKAP, this is a very different observatory; it has no dishes but antennas in the form of long buckets designed to capture light. In January, the CHIME team reported the detection of the second FRB repeater and 12 non-repeating FRBs. CHIME is expected to find many, many more bursts, and with ASKAP, MeerKAT and CHIME working together, astronomers hope to understand the true nature of the enigmatic radio flashes very soon.
But will they fulfill Milner’s dream and successfully complete SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Lorimer says that scientists hunting for FRBs and pulsars have for decades been working closely with colleagues involved in SETI projects.
After all, Loeb’s models for different—alien—origins of FRBs are not fundamentally wrong. “The energetics when you consider what we know from the observations are consistent and there’s nothing wrong with that,” says Lorimer. “And as part of the scientific method, you definitely want to encourage those ideas.” He personally prefers to find the simplest natural explanation for the phenomena he observes in space—but until we manage to directly observe the source of these FRBs, all theoretical ideas should stand, as long as they are scientifically sound—whether they involve aliens or not.
Updated 7-24-19, 6:45 pm EDT: This article has been updated to reflect Yuri Milner's Israeli citizenship.
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
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