Scientists I found a mysterious radio signal In space exploding in a heartbeat-like pattern and before you ask, no, not aliens. At least that’s what they tell us.

Using the CHIME radio telescope (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment), astronomers observed a strange FRB, or radio burst, from a galaxy far away billions of light years from Earth. The signal lasted for up to three seconds, which is exceptionally long for the FRB. The team also detected “bursts of radio waves that repeat every 0.2 seconds with a distinct periodic pattern, similar to a heartbeat,” according to press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“It was unusual,” said Danielle Micheli, a postdoctoral researcher. at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the press release. “It wasn’t very long, and lasted about three seconds, but there were periodic peaks that were remarkably accurate, with every millisecond—boom, boom, boom—emitting like a heartbeat. This is the first time the signal itself has been cyclical. .”

But again, foreigners do not communicate with us. Apparently. Scientists think the signal most likely comes from some kind of neutron star.

“There aren’t many things in the universe that emit strictly periodic signals,” said Micheli, part of the team that discovered FRB. with. “An example we know of in our galaxy are radio and magnetic pulsars, which orbit and produce a lighthouse-like emission. We think this new signal could be a magnetar or a pulsar on doping.”

boo. Just once, could you be aliens? But as Myriam Kramer She once wrote in Mashable, “They are not aliens. They are never aliens. Stop saying they are aliens.”