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Cosmic Anomalies & Strange Signals
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The Radio Burst That Repeats on a Clock From a Galaxy 3 Billion Light-Years Away
FRB 121102 was the first fast radio burst caught repeating — millisecond flashes from a dwarf galaxy that pulse on a roughly 157-day cycle and sit inside one of the most extreme magnetic environments ever measured.
'Oumuamua Got a Push Nobody Can Fully Explain, and a Harvard Chair Says It Was a Sail
The first known interstellar visitor sped up on its way out of the solar system in a way no purely gravitational orbit predicts, yet it showed no comet's tail. Astronomers detected the push at high confidence; the cause is still openly contested.
The Golden Record: We Bolted a Mixtape to a Spaceship and Threw It Into Forever
Two probes now drifting in interstellar space each carry a gold-plated copper disc engraved with the sounds, music, images, and greetings of Earth — a deliberate message aimed at whoever, or whatever, eventually finds them. It is the most optimistic act of broadcasting in human history, and possibly the most consequential.
Wow!: The 72-Second Cosmic Shout That Has Never Said Another Word
On August 15, 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio caught a narrowband signal from the direction of Sagittarius so sharp and so loud that the astronomer reviewing the printout circled it and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin. Nearly fifty years and many re-observations later, it has never come back.
The Star That Whispered Back Was Wearing a Red Star: How a Soviet Ghost Satellite Faked First Contact
In 2016 a Russian dish caught a powerful pulse from a Sun-like star 92 light years away in Hercules, and for a week the planet held its breath. The beacon turned out to be a dead military satellite that no catalog had ever bothered to list.
The Radio Burst From the Wrong Neighborhood: FRB 20200120E Fires From an 11-Billion-Year-Old Graveyard
Fast radio bursts are supposed to come from young, freshly-exploded stars. This one was traced to a globular cluster orbiting a nearby galaxy — a retirement home for ancient stars where the favored explanation simply cannot exist.
A Cosmic Mystery Haunted Astronomers for 17 Years. It Was the Lunchroom Microwave.
The Parkes telescope kept detecting millisecond bursts that mimicked deep-space signals. The culprit was the kitchen microwave, opened early by staff on lunch break, leaking radiation as its magnetron shut down.
Pravda Announced First Contact in 1965. The 'Aliens' Were a Black Hole Breathing 8 Billion Light-Years Away.
Soviet astronomers reported that the radio source CTA-102 was 'pulsing' like an artificial beacon, and the Type II civilization made global front pages. It was a quasar — and The Byrds wrote a song about it.
The Star That Made Astronomers Say 'Alien Megastructure' Out Loud, Then Took It Back
A single Sun-like star dimmed by up to 22 percent in irregular patterns no one had seen before, prompting serious published discussion of a Dyson sphere. The leading suspect now is dust, but the case is not fully closed.
It Came From Another Star, Sped Up Leaving, and Showed No Tail. A Harvard Astronomer Said: Technology.
The first confirmed interstellar object accelerated on its way out of the solar system with no visible outgassing to explain it. The measurements are real; the explanation is still a fight.
Little Green Men 1: The Signal So Perfect Cambridge Briefly Thought It Was Aliens
In 1967 a graduate student named Jocelyn Bell found a radio signal pulsing every 1.337 seconds with clockwork regularity, and the team labeled it LGM-1 — 'Little Green Men.' It turned out to be the first spinning neutron star ever detected, a corpse of a star turning the cosmos into a metronome.
There's a Star Whose Light Is Full of Elements That Should Not Exist. Something Is Replenishing Them.
Przybylski's Star carries the fingerprints of short-lived radioactive elements in its spectrum — atoms that should have decayed away long ago. Either an exotic natural process is constantly remaking them, or someone is.