[LINK] "Mathematical Pattern Found in Enigmatic Radio Bursts, But It’s Not E.T."

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic's Nadia Drake reports how new findings seemingly confirm that mysterious radio bursts speculated to be artifacts of extraterrestrial civilizations are not.

Astronomers estimate the bursts’ distance using something called a dispersion measure, which tracks how much interstellar gunk the signal has passed through*. Bursts that are farther away travel through more gunk than bursts that are closer to Earth.

When Michael Hippke of Germany’s Institute for Data Analysis recently plotted the dispersion measures of the 11 known bursts, he and his colleagues found something surprising: All the dispersion measures are integer multiples of the same number, 187.5.

[. . .]

So what’s going on? If the pattern is real, it suggests fast radio bursts are not coming from all over the universe, says astronomer Scott Ransom of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “In that case, they should be smoothly distributed in dispersion measure,” he says. Alternatively, the signals could be coming from closer to Earth. “[The pattern] could point to a very strange kind of radio frequency interference, I suppose,” he says.

As a March 31 story in New Scientist notes, one possible explanation for the mysterious 187.5 is pulsars, perhaps behaving according to physical laws we’re not yet aware of. Another is an unmapped spy satellite, masquerading as a signal from the distant universe.

Or, just maybe, 187.5 is the arrow pointing to ET.

It’s an exciting possibility. Trouble is, the trend identified in the study isn’t likely to survive – for one simple reason: Newer observations, not included in the study or reported by New Scientist, don’t fit.