Scientists say distant galaxies are blasting us with high-powered cosmic beams. Sadly, it doesn't look like aliens are to blame
A team of experts now believe that a particularly rare form of cosmic ray burst is coming from far away galaxies some 326 million light-years away.
Extragalactic regions with massive “starburst galaxies” which are producing vast numbers of new stars may be to blame.
Scientists at the Pierre Auger collaboration, who studied ten years of readings from Pierre Auger Observatory, the largest telescope of its kind, now believe they can trace the signal’s path.
The discovery came after alien hunters from the Breakthrough Listen project picked up mystery signals which may have been produced by “extraterrestrial civilisations”.
Professor Karl-Heinz Kampert (University of Wuppertal), the spokesperson for the Auger Collaboration, which involves over 400 scientists from 18 countries, said: “We are now considerably closer to solving the mystery of where and how these extraordinary particles are created, a question of great interest to astrophysicists.
“Our observation provides compelling evidence that the sites of acceleration are outside the Milky Way”.
Professor Alan Watson from the University of Leeds, said the result was “one of the most exciting that we have obtained and one which solves a problem targeted when the Observatory was conceived by Jim Cronin and myself over 25 years ago”.
For fifty years, experts have debated whether these particular energy bursts were created in our own Milky Way or in distant “extragalactic objects”.
Their findings were published in Science on Friday, detailed how the cosmic rays – which have energies a million times greater than that of the protons accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider – come from much further afield than first realised.
Cosmic rays are a rare find.
As they become more energetic, their numbers fall and it’s extremely difficult for telescopes on Earth to pick them up.
Understanding what they are and where they are coming from could unlock clues to the Universe and help scientists understand how our own planet was formed.
Breakthrough Listen, a project dedicated to finding signs of intelligent life in the universe, recently detected 15 “fast radio burst” (FRB) signals coming from a mysterious cluster of stars – and did not rule out the possibility they were produced by extraterrestrial civilisations.
However, experts fear getting in touch with aliens might be a very bad move.
Professor Stephen Hawking recently claimed extraterrestrials are likely to be “rapacious marauders roaming the cosmos in search of resources to plunder, and planets to conquer and colonise”.
