And no one has a clear answer why.
What is actually giving rise
to these very powerful flashes?
There's always a danger, well, maybe this is actually ET.
We gotta make sure we're doing the right thing here.
To solve this mystery,
scientists will search for clues
billions of light years from home.
Then come face to face with one of the strangest
most violent phenomena in the known universe.
If you get close enough, it will actually start
to elongate the molecules,
and it would rip the water out of your body.
(birds chirping)
The small towns of West Virginia's Highlands
are some of the most isolated in America.
But today, one of them finds itself
in the center of a cosmic mystery.
All because of this, the Green Bank Telescope.
One of the largest movable objects on dry earth.
The structure here stands almost
485 feet above ground level.
It's actually taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
These huge wheels, five-foot diameter steel wheels,
are the support structure and actually roll
on this track system.
This structure weighs almost 17 million pounds.
So each one of these 16 wheels carries
more than a million pounds.
And the GBT is more
than just strong, it's agile.
We can see more of the celestial sphere
here in Green Bank than can be seen
from any single telescope anywhere else in the world.
We can see 85% of the celestial sphere
from this point right here.
And the view from Green Bank has changed
our understanding of the planets, the stars,
and other cosmic phenomena.
And from this remote place,
Dr. Frank Drake pioneered the field known as SETI,
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
using the first telescope built at this observatory.
He developed a formula known as the Drake Equation.
To estimate the number of intelligent civilizations
occupying our known universe today.
Some have calculated that number
to be well into the millions.
Astronomers are now searching these same skies
for clues to help solve a new mystery,
the source of a string of unidentified signals
they call fast radio bursts.
They will do so by scanning the cosmos for radio waves.
Radio telescope is like any other telescope.
It collects radiation from the sky.
You're more familiar probably with an optical telescope,
which collects light waves at visible wavelengths.
Well, radio waves are the same kind of thing.
They're just longer, bigger.
Sometimes I call it tired light.
And the radio waves being detected
by the GBT are so faint that even the slightest
electronic interference would drown out the signals
collected by its 100-meter dish.
A single cellphone on standby, not even talking on it,
but just on standby waiting on a signal,
placed on Mars would completely overwhelm anything
the astronomer is looking for.
Engineers have the daily challenge
of shielding the telescope from the electronic noise
bombarding it from space and closer to home.
The instruments in the telescope's receiver
are kept below minus 300 degrees fahrenheit,
bringing molecular motion to a near halt.
The GBT's control room is sealed in copper,
preventing any manmade signals from leaking out.
Even life in and around Green Bank is dictated
by the needs of the telescope.
We don't have cell service here.
There is no Wi-Fi; it's prohibited completely.
Television is a little tricky.
And the few microwave ovens permitted
on campus have been encased in metal shielding.
You sort of live like people lived in the '50s.
The enforced silence around the telescope
allows it to detect signals that few others can.
(dramatic music)
45 years into its journey,
the Voyager Spacecraft has left the solar system.
It's more than 11 billion miles from Earth,
beyond the reach of our sun,
a faint beacon is its only connection to its home planet.
And it's emitting a radio signal which has the equivalent
energy of about a 20- or 25-watt light bulb.
Astronomers at the Green Bank Telescope
make an attempt to track Voyager down.
(dramatic music)
They find it in a matter of seconds.
We can pick that signal up with the GBT.
It's actually a really bright signal.
No problem at all.
The signals that we're detecting
from fast radio bursts are even weaker than that.
(dramatic music)
When fast radio bursts erupt,
they can unleash as much energy as our sun does
in an entire year in a fraction of a second.
But by the time that energy reaches Earth,
it's a mere whisper.
And while astronomers have now detected dozens
of different fast radio bursts,
one of them is different from the rest,
and they're determined to find out why.
They call it FRB 121102.
The source of that signal now enters
the GBT's field of view.
From the telescope's control room one mile away
Dr. Ryan Lynch directs the telescope
to lock in on the target.
So the GBT sees a very small portion
in the sky at any given time,
so we have to be able to control where
it's pointing very, very precisely.
So if you think about a really little tiny crater
or mark on the moon that you might be able
to see with your naked eye,
that's basically the amount of sky
that we're seeing right now.
And there's an even greater challenge
to observing 121102.
We don't know when it's going to actually emit a burst.
And the bursts only last for a fraction of a second,
only a few milliseconds.
So we have spent many tens, probably hundreds of hours
on the GBT over the course of the last few years
observing this object,
and hundreds of hours on other telescopes.
And we've only detected a few hundred bursts.
And if you would add all of those bursts up,
they would only add up to a few seconds' worth of time
when the source is actually active.
Like most observations,
this one comes up empty.
This is such an interesting object
and it's such a big mystery in radio astronomy right now
that it's worth spending all of that time.
The Green Bank team's search for answers is
about to get a major boost.
They're partners with Breakthrough Listen.
The world's largest SETI project have made
a major investment in the telescope's computing system.
If you have a laptop with a one terabyte hard drive,
this represents about 4000 of those.
Dave MacMahon has installed enough new hardware
to effectively double the observing power of the GBT.
So it's kind of like we got a big upgrade
to our cable box; we went from standard to deluxe package.
We're open for business.
The team hopes this upgrade will help them
build on the few seconds' worth of data captured
on FRB 121102 so far.
A few seconds that have set off a series of discoveries
and made this one of the hottest topics
in astronomy today.
When FRB-121102 was first discovered,
everything got thrown into overdrive.
We knew it was special almost right away
because no other FRB event has been seen to repeat.
They realized they're dealing
with a one-of-a-kind phenomenon.
And because this one signal repeats,
they knew they could tease more information out of it.
It's kind of like if you're in the woods
and a bird chirps and you hear it one time,
you're like, wait, what was that bird?
I heard it but I couldn't quite figure out what it was.
And if you hear a few more chirps of the bird,
then you might be, okay, I now I know what this is.
It's a robin.
They could now track the location of the signal
to the Constellation of Auriga.
Once we were able to localize 121102,
we realized that this galaxy has never been seen before.
Sometimes I try to think about the incredible scale
of all the distant objects that we're listening to
and it boggles the mind.
They now knew where
FRB 121102 was coming from.
But they still didn't know what was generating the signal.
But each subsequent flash of energy helped them
narrow down their list of suspects.
When fast radio bursts were first discovered,
they were all one-off events.
And so a lot of the early theories focused
on catastrophic events that would destroy
whatever was actually causing the fast radio bursts.
That could be things like an exploding star or supernova.
It was a huge explosion.
Maybe two neutron stars colliding.
So when we start to see it repeat,
that changes our whole paradigm of what it could be.
And it is still the only known
fast radio burst that repeats.
And that makes it an especially big mystery.
Once astronomers discovered
that this wasn't a one-and-done phenomena,
they had to find a celestial body
that could expel bursts of radio waves
without destroying itself.
They began to suspect that the signal
could be coming from a pulsar.
Pulsars are dead stars that emit radio waves
so predictably that NASA has discussed using them
as cosmic beacons, guiding future space missions.
But the strength of 121102's signal is
far beyond the typical pulsar's.
And there's something else about these bursts
that puzzles astronomers.
You might think to yourself
that with all of those bursts
we would be able to find some sort of a pattern
or a regularity in when they're going off.
But we've looked really hard
and we haven't been able to find anything like that yet.
Because astronomers haven't been able
to uncover a pattern to 121102's
seemingly random burst cycle,
they've had to search beyond pulsars for an explanation.
Continuing the work begun here by Frank Drake
more than 50 years ago,
the astronomers from Breakthrough Listen wonder
if signals like these could conceal a message
from a distant civilization.
Anytime there's a new astrophysical phenomenon
discovered, I think aliens are one of the explanations
for it that people put on a list.
In space, radio waves can be created
by natural cosmic events, but they're rare.
On Earth, we've learned that they can
be created artificially by intelligent species, like us.
The energy emitted by 121102 is staggering,
equivalent to 500 million suns,
far beyond human capacity.
But the scale of that explosive power
does not concern SETI's astronomers.
Part of our assumptions in the SETI field
is that we are just getting into radio technology.
We've only had it for 100 years.
And other civilizations could be far more
developed than we are.
I don't think that there's some fundamental limit
to how strong a signal some intelligence
could create if they wanted to.
The question for astronomers then
is not just why this signal is so strong,
but whether it carries any information.
When one gets a radio signal from outer space
you automatically start to think about extraterrestrials.
While we can't rule out all FRB sources,
we're pretty confident that
FRB 121102 is not an ET source.
With ET signals, one would expect a lot of information
to be encoded into that signal.
And all the information that we're getting
from this burst has a natural explanation.
To demonstrate what an encoded message
could look and sound like,
Andrew Seymour has created one from scratch.
Each pixel in this image of the
Green Bank Observatory's logo corresponds
to a different frequency and time.
Think about them like a series of notes on a sheet of music.
Here, instead of having seven or 12 notes
that we may have on other instruments,
we have over 1000 notes being played here.
When all of those notes are played together
we see and hear this.
(electronic screeching)
And if we were to broadcast those frequencies into space.
If another civilization was recording
with computers the same way we are,
they would see this image come
across their computer screens.
(electronic screeching)
But when Andrew analyzed this signal
from one of FRB 121102's bursts,
he discovered something very different.
(electronic screeching)
One may think that there's information coded in that,
but it has a natural explanation.
As strange as the sound and image may appear,
Andrew finds nothing unusual or alien about them.
Instead of a message, he sees a snapshot
of an explosive moment from a distant galaxy.
(electronic screeching)
Many still believe that if we were to receive
a message from a distant civilization,
it would come to us cloaked in a radio signal like this.
And that is one more reason why every new radio burst
is met with such anticipation.
Now that scientists have determined
that the source of the unidentified repeating signal is
unlikely to be a supernova or a pulsar
or even a message from beyond our galaxy
they've turned their attention to one of the most exotic
and violent phenomena in the universe, magnetars.
It's something that we love to study from afar.
(Chuckle) Don't wanna get too close.
Like pulsars, magnetars are superdense
remnants of stars that have gone supernova.
Imagine an object with the same mass as 500000 Earths
but squeezed into about the size of a city.
That's the equivalent density of taking every person
on the planet and squeezing them into a sugar cube.
What sets them apart is their magnetic force.
Magnetars have the strongest magnetic fields
in the universe.
If you were to take a magnetar and place it
at the distance of the moon,
which would not be a good idea,
because it would destroy the Earth,
but in the process it would also erase all
of the computer hard drives and credit cards on the Earth
because of the strength of the magnetic field.
What a magnetar would do to a human body
is even more alarming.
It will actually start to elongate the molecules
in your body, and it would rip the water out
of your body because those molecules
themselves are slightly magnetic.
It's not gonna end well for you.
When a crack forms on a magnetar's
rigid surface, it can set off a starquake,
ejecting so much energy that it can be felt
billions of light years across the universe.
Magnetars are extremely rare on their own.
And when scientists observed the radio waves
from FRB 121102 they discovered something rarer still.
We saw that they were really twisted up,
kind of like a corkscrew.
And the degree of twist is higher
than in any other source of radio waves
that we've ever detected.
So we think that this could be a sign
that FRB 121102 is itself living
somewhere near a black hole.
With radio telescopes like the GBD,
astronomers are peering into deep space,
tracing a series of cataclysmic events from deep time.
A white hot magnetar nestled in the orbit of a black hole,
firing off instantaneous bursts of energy
that billions of years later can be observed from Earth.
But with every new discovery comes a new set of questions.
Within our own galaxy we have something
that's very similar.
So why are these energetic events happening
in other galaxies, but yet not our own?
I think all scientists are just naturally drawn
to something that they can't explain.
Decoding FRB 121102 has revealed
a part of the universe we never knew before.
And it could also help us better understand
the explosive magnetars discovered
in our own galaxy as well.
But in this quest, astronomers understand
that timing is everything.
Even though we're only detecting the bursts now
they were actually emitted hundreds of millions
to billions of years ago.
So it seems like we're watching
this drama unfold in real time,
but in fact the objects that have created these bursts
may very well be long gone.
But even a signal from the distant past
can be meaningful.
I almost feel like a moral compunction
to listen if we can because it would be a shame
to have these signals coming from somewhere else
and we just sort of missed out
because we didn't wanna listen for them.
Our radio programs have looked at a few thousand stars.
The optical people have maybe looked at maybe 10000 stars.
So that's 10000 stars out of a few hundred billion.
So not a lot.
And then I say, okay, let's set the volume of that space
equal to the volume of the Earth's oceans.
Then you come up with a very sobering analogy
that so far we've search about
one eight-ounce glass out of the ocean.
So not a lot, but we're on an exponential curve.
Our tools are getting better and faster.
The growing number of signals picked up
by the world's radio telescopes are generating
an ever increasing flow of information
from across time and space.
There is no limit to what they might tell us
about our universe.
So long as we remain curious
and continue to look and listen to the stars.
(dramatic music)