Astrophysicist Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker and her team saw the strange object sending repeated radio signals every 18 minutes is signal of aliens contact. They thought they might have found evidence of life from outside of Earth.
After seeing a “impossible” spinning object 4,000 light years away, scientists thought they might have found proof of an alien life form.
Is aliens contact possible?
Astronomers said that the strange device was sending radio signals over and over again every 18 minutes. They also said that it was unlike anything they had ever seen in space.
Observations showed that it gave off a huge amount of energy three times an hour.
Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist, “broke out in a cold sweat” when she thought about a possible breakthrough in the search for life beyond Earth.
She said she asked herself if this was “the moment we finally found out that the truth is… out there?”
The team’s leader, Dr. Hurley-Walker from Australia, told News Science and Nature, “I was worried that it was aliens.”
When they found the object, her team from Curtin University’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) was mapping radio waves in the universe.
It was found by a student named Tyrone O’Doherty.
Dr. Hurley-Walker told The Conversation that when she first looked at the data, she thought the signals were just noise.
But an observation made 18 minutes later showed that “the source was once again in the same place and at the same frequency.”
She also said, “Like nothing astronomers had ever seen before.”
“I broke out in a cold sweat at this point.”
Dr. Hurley-Walker talked about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, an international effort to find repeating radio signals from space that are sent at a certain frequency.
“Did we finally find out that the truth is out there now?” she asked.
Observations showed that the object kept showing up and going away.
But after a few hours, the team was able to “breathe a sigh of relief” because the source was found across a wide range of frequencies so not sure is a aliens contact. This meant that it could only have come from a natural source because it would take so much power to make it.
Now, they think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf, which are the names for the cores of stars that have collapsed.
