There is only a slight coating of snow on the ground at Coal Speaker home mine, but the super snow moon is shining brightly above..
The moon’s fame comes from this February traditional thought: The Snow Moon is the Full Moon in February, named due to the simple face that the snow is usually on the ground. Some North American tribes named it the Hunger Moon due to the scarce food sources and hard hunting conditions during mid-winter, while others named it the Storm Moon.
Indeed, cultures have long seen signs in the stars and messages in the skies.
Maybe the messages are finally getting through!
FAST AND WEIRD
We have been hearing about these weird “fast mystery radio bursts” for several years now..
The first discovery of these strange little things came in 2007.. Strange signals, we were told in a 2016 report from NATURE, were bombarding Earth.. No one was quite sure at the time where they were coming from and if they meant anything..
AUGUST 24, 2001
A 5-millisecond radio burst that had arrived on 24 August 2001 from an unknown source seemingly billions of light years away..
THIS IS HOW SPACE.COM reported the event on September 27, 2007:
The single,short-lived blast of radio waves likely occurred some 3 billion light-years from Earth, and it may signal a cosmic car crash of two neutron stars, the death throes of a black hole—or something else.
“This is something that’s completely unprecedented,” said Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown and the National RadioAstronomy Observatory who led the discovery-making team. He noted that radio-emitting pulsars send out similar emissions, but repeat them every few hours.
The report continued,
“We’re confused and excited, but it could open up a whole new research field,” Lorimer told SPACE.com of the 5-millisecond blip on the cosmic radar screen. “If we really go after these things, we expect to find out that a couple hundred of them occur each day.”
Back in 2014, we got to hear the strange sounds recorded by the Rosetta mission as it detecetd a mysterious signal coming from the 2.5 mil Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:
CONTINUOUS FLASHES FROM SOMEWHERE
NATURE reported this in 2016:
“It was so bright, we couldn’t just dismiss it,” says Duncan Lorimer, who co-discovered the signal1 in 2007 while working on archived data from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. “But we didn’t really know what to do with it.”
FRBs are intensely energetic events that flare for just milliseconds, seemingly all over the sky and from outside the galaxy…
In 2018, Mike Wall wrote this for SPACE.COM:
A huge haul of newfound fast radio bursts (FRBs) may help astronomers finally start to get a handle on these mysterious and powerful blasts from deep space.
A new study reports the detection of 19 previously undiscovered FRBs, including the closest one to Earth and the brightest one ever seen. The results boost the total tally significantly; just three dozen or so FRBs had been known previously, with the first detection coming in 2007.
Back in 2019 we heard that a Canadian telescope discovered intriguing blasts that repeat their signals..
On June 27, 2019, Brandon Specktor wrote this in LIVE SCIENCE:
Three and a half billion years ago, a mysterious object on the edge of a distant galaxy spewed forth an intensely bright, vanishingly brief burst of radio energy that shot across the universe.
That pulse of energy — known to its fans in the astronomy community as a fast radio burst (FRB) — passed through a wilderness of gas, dust and empty space on its multi-billion-year journey, slowly stretching and changing color as it moved. Then, for less than a millisecond in 2018, that burst zapped past a special telescope in Earth’s Australian outback, giving scientists a rare opportunity to shake hands with one of the most mysterious forms of energy in the universe.
We have what is believed to be a 10-billion-year-old galaxy. Earth is only have that age… What is a civilization of some form predated everything we know on this pale blue dot?
THE NEWEST SIGNS
All of this history behind us… enter the newest set of interesting facts: A new study by an international team of scientists led by astronomers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project in British Columbia has discovered that a mystery radio source in a galaxy some 500 million lightyears from our solar system is sending out fast radio bursts like clockwork in 16.35 day cycles, including 1-2 bursts per hour over a four day period and then 12 days of silence before starting up again..
THIS IS THE ACTUAL STORY FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO PAGE THROUGH IT..
Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown told Science News: “This is very significant.
“It’s potentially going to take us in an interesting direction to get to the bottom of these repeaters.”
BUT ALIENS?
There is rampant speculation that these bursts are aliens.. but calmer heads would argue that this particular fast radio burst could be orbiting something else, such as a star or a black hole.
Leon Oostrum at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy told New Scientist: “If it were an alien beacon I would think it would emit more quickly, because a 16-day period is not efficient for communication. “Imagine getting one signal every 16 days – it would take forever to get a message.”
And even more.. let’s consider this fact: The bursts are coming from 500 million years ago. It sure takes a while for alien mail to get here.
Some may say this… with the notion that these bursts are coming from 500 million years ago, whomever or whatever sent the signals were not targeting humans.. There were no humans 500 million years ago.
… imaginations ponder.. what if this 500 million year old message is just a dying planet.. one ravaged by war and pestilence.. one that is at its last days as life is numbered.. and the final forms of life send out a fast radio wave in the hopes that someone comes to save them. 500 million years later, we get their final cry for help..
WE HAVE FAST BURSTS TOO
This is what NPR reported in 2008:
In 1951, when CBS first broadcast the I Love Lucy show, Ricky, Lucy, Fred and Ethel became electromagnetic signals traveling at nearly the speed of light to receivers all over America, where they got bounced on to our living rooms and into our lives.
But not all those signals stayed on Earth.
A few signals bounced off the surface of our planet or shot straight up into the sky and continued onward. Traveling at light speed in empty space, the signals arrived at the moon after a second and a half, says astronomer Chris Impey of the University of Arizona. An hour later, Lucy passed Jupiter. Five hours later, she was at the edge of our solar system. So where is her signal today? “It’s traveled for 57 years,” says Impey, “and a light year is about 4 trillion miles, so 57 light years is about 200 trillion miles.”
That’s a long voyage. I Love Lucy passed Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, around 1955 and has now moved past about 200 stars and who knows how many planets. This raises the question: If there’s intelligent life out there, could it hear Lucy?
She has some ‘splainin to do..’
I would walk 500 million miles and I would walk 500 million more
….the final takeaway.. Contact? Maybe someone tried. ET life? ….N.ever A. S.traight A.nswer…
But until we know for sure or maybe guess some more, there’s one meaning of life that was made abundantly clear by Monty Python so many decades ago.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!
