Aliens May Be Signaling Us Via Galactic Flashes

At this point, analyzing cosmic events called celestial flashes represent a brand new area of astronomy, and one that garners a lot of interest from numerous research groups. Some even say that the events may in fact represent signals sent to us by alien civilizations hiding among the stars.

Galactic flashes may have a wide variety of explanations, explains Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) radio astronomer Joseph Lazio, who is leading a research team searching for these events.

“These flashes can be anything from explosions on surfaces of nearby stars, deaths of distant stars, exploding black holes, or even perhaps transmissions by other civilizations,” the expert says.

He is hopeful that the research collaboration of which he is a part will soon be able to gain more insight into these mysterious cosmic events by using the Long Wavelength Array. This is an observatory currently being built in New Mexico, the United States.

Once completed, the LWA will contain in excess of 13,000 ceiling fan-like antennas, that will provide astronomers with a fresh perspective of the sky. The telescope will conduct investigations over a wide range of wavelengths, its designers say.

Whereas work on the project is spearheaded by the University of New Mexico, the NASA JPL, based in Pasadena, California, is handling the development of the advanced digital electronic systems that will be the eyes and ears of the LWA.

A major milestone for the project will be achieved this summer, when the first station of the LWA is due to go online with 256 antennas. A total of 53 stations need to be built to complete the observatory.

The array will cover an area nearly 400 kilometers (248 miles) in diameter, and it will provide sensitive, high-resolution views of a portion of the night sky that is hundreds of times larger than the full Moon, Daily Galaxy reports.

“Because nature is more clever than we are, it's quite possible that we will discover something we haven't thought of,” Lazio says. He adds that one thing we could discover could be radio waves coming in from exoplanets.