KIC 8462852 Alien Megastructure Star Update 01/25/2017

This is another installment in my continuing coverage of KIC 8462852 or Boyajian's star for January 25, 2017. Several new developments have come out that are offering fresh takes on just what's causing the mysterious dips in brightness observed to be occurring at this bizarre star. One involves a new natural explanation to consider and the other expands on a specific type of alien activity that could explain a very unique and odd feature contained within the Kepler light curve.

Observations of the star continue with no new dimming events yet detected. This is unfortunate as actually capturing a dimming event and studying it in more detail than Kepler could is key to solving the mystery, or would at least clear a lot of things up, see my previous videos on this subject for information on that. But it may not be too much longer before the next dimming event if one prediction holds true. More on that in a minute.

The first development came in the form of a paper by Brian Metzger and his colleagues at Colombia University in New York. This theory is noteworthy because their paper manages to merge two really odd aspects of the phenomenon that is happening at KIC 8462852, link to the paper in the description below. Boyajian's star isn't just dimming, it's doing it in two different ways and that's been difficult to reconcile with the previous natural explanations that have been offered.

On the one hand, we have the large, deep dips that the Kepler spacecraft observed that drew scientist's attention in the first place. But on the other, we have an apparent trend of the star dimming over all over the course of a century based on a study of photographic plates and confirmed by another study of the Kepler data. So we have a star that dims on both long-term and short-term timescales. Very mysterious indeed, and Occam's razor leads us to conclude that the two phenomena are almost certainly linked and that places a lot of constraints on just what could be causing it.

But Metzger and his team offer an answer that has a bit more plausibility than most of the natural theories so far put forth. They offer that Boyajian's star has recently torn apart and eaten a planet. This would create a situation where the star would brighten for a short period of time and then comparatively quickly calm back down fitting the long-term dimming trend observed with the star. It would simply be a star recovering after recently having had a burst of energy just after dinner.

But there would also likely be debris leftover after such an event that would block starlight more or less like what we would see in the deep dips in the Kepler light curve. This could be disassociated material from the torn apart planet itself or its moons and if it were in the right kind of highly elliptical orbit it would solve a further mystery involving the lack of infrared radiation which should be present from any small particle dusty material orbiting the star the bulk of which the Columbia team point out could have been blown far out into space by solar radiation where it's now simply too cool to see in IR.

Other than one feature, the day 792 dip which is still a bit of a head-scratcher, the Kepler light curve does look much like a young star system surrounded by dust and gas looks. The trouble is, KIC 8462852 does not appear to be a young star and shouldn't have this sort of debris disc around it any longer.

That's what makes this particular theory attractive because it allows a star like Boyajian's star which appears to be old to have a debris disc, dim and then brighten again overall, and also undergo brief, deep dimming events yet show no infrared heat radiating off the material.

But, as with all theories involving KIC 8462852, there's a problem. And it's a big one. This would be a very short-term event, the planet would have fallen into Boyajian's star between 200 and 10,000 years previous to the dips, remember we're seeing KIC 8462852 as it was over 1200 years ago as that's how long its light takes reach us.

This is a conspicuously short period in geologic time scales. And while such events are bound to happen, gravity is gravity and it's a safe bet that planets do indeed fall into stars, it should be statistically very hard to catch such a thing in the act because it happens very quickly as far as geologic time is concerned. You'd just have to be looking at just the right moment to see the aftermath of a star eating a planet making this an exceedingly rare event. You have better odds of winning the lottery than catching something like this as it was occurring.

One thing we don't really know is how often planets fall into stars, so it's possible that this is a more common event than we currently think, in which case we'll have to revise our thinking on the frequency of these sorts of events and look for more examples to corroborate it. As Dr. Jason Wright points out on his blog, link in the description below, most stars in KIC 8462852's class would need to be regularly eating planets and they'd also have to do it by going into highly eccentric orbits and you'd need a somewhat  implausible amount of planetary material in the universe to fit the bill. Once again, Boyajian's star throws us a curve ball and only time and more study will clear that up.

But even if the star ate a planet, then the mysterious day 792 dip from the Kepler data is  going to take a bit more explaining than the other features in the Kepler light curve. It really is odd and that leads us to the second development.

This one stems from something I covered in my previous update in December and deals directly with the day 792 dip and the potential activity of an alien civilization if this is in fact what we're seeing, which is still on the table, though I caution remains highly unlikely, partially because of the same problem that the planet eating theory suffers from; you'd have to just be really lucky and happen to catch the aliens in the act which is highly unlikely unless aliens are far more common than the Fermi paradox would suggest. But people do win the lottery, so it's possible.

As I covered in my previous update, Dr. Eduard Heindl has advanced a hypothesis that the activity we're seeing at Boyajian's star could be due to stellar lifting, a hypothetical method that advanced civilizations might employ to harvest materials from their star.

In his blog, link in the description below, he offers models on the different dips observed by Kepler especially the odd day 792 dip that suggest that the behavior of Boyajian's star could be indicative of an advanced alien species using a beam to lift material from their star. But not only that, he goes further to suggest that it would be possible to calculate the rotational period of that beam. If this is the case, then the next dip should begin on or around February 21st of 2017.

While I am always very cautious when I talk about the potential for alien activity at KIC 8462852, I personally would bet money that what we're seeing is a natural phenomenon, I would be remiss if I didn't admit that this story would change very dramatically and become even more interesting if that predicted dip occurs on schedule. We shall see.

The Gliese 710 Close Encounter

Over the course of a single human lifetime the night sky does not change much at all. Except for the motions of the planets and the occasional comet or rare guest star such as the coming Boom Star, the night sky will look the same from the day you were born to the day you die. But in the sense of geologic time, the galaxy is a roiling ever-changing place full of stars moving to and fro and sometimes passing by and disrupting each other's solar systems.

We are not immune to this. About 7.3 million years ago the Algol star system passed by our sun at a distance of just under ten light years. That's not that close, Proxima Centauri is currently less than half that distance away. But unlike Proxima, which is a tiny red dwarf star, Algol is a multiple star system that contains a lot of mass. That mass  may have been enough to disturb the Oort cloud and may have slightly increased the number of comets entering the inner solar system at the time. While the danger of that specific event was negligible, comets have smacked into planet earth in the past and will do so in the future unless we do something about it.

But the most pronounced effect of that close encounter would have been on the appearance of the night sky. Algol would have been the brightest proper star in the heavens, significantly beating out the current brightest star which is Sirius, the dog star. While not as bright as Venus or the Moon, Algol would have otherwise dominated the late night sky rivaling Jupiter and Mars in apparent magnitude.

But that encounter is in the past and no harm was done that we know of. But what of the future? About 1.35 million years from now we will have a far, far closer encounter with another star. It's called Gliese 710 and not only will it perturb our Oort cloud, it has a high likelihood of directly passing through it.

While there's still a lot of uncertainty as to just how close this stellar intruder will pass, the current best prediction is that its closest approach will be about 13,000 astronomical units out. For comparison, an astronomical unit is 149.6 million kilometers which is essentially the distance between the earth and the sun. That may sound like a lot until you convert that distance into the more familiar light-year system that we use in astronomy.

A light-year is the distance a wave of light travels in a year at 186,000 miles per second, so a star system like alpha centauri is just under 4.5 light years away at 40 trillion kilometers or roughly around 300,000 astronomical units. Space, even the local area, is unbelievably huge .

As a result 13,000 astronomical units is not that much at all, so much so that the light-year is not really the best distance scale you could apply to Gliese 710. It will pass about 77 light-days from us.

That's a very close pass indeed. Now, Gliese 710 is in a different class than Algol and won't light up the sky as a second sun. It only possesses about 60 percent of the mass of our own sun and will be 13000 times further away. But it will rival Mars and Jupiter in the night sky as Algol once did.

But unlike Algol, the proximity of Gliese 710 could have disastrous results for earth due to a prediction that there is an 86 percent chance that it will enter our Oort cloud and a near certainty that it will gravitationally disturb it.

The star currently poses no danger at all as it's 63.8 light-years away still. But the star's small proper motion suggests that it's heading more or less straight for us. When it does finally approach us it could hypothetically unleash a hail of comets entering the inner solar system and endangering earth with an impact event. Now, comets are nothing new of course, visible ones pass through the inner solar system every few years or so. But the estimates for the Gliese 710 encounter could push those numbers up to as many as 10 visible comets per year.

That would be a spectacular sight indeed, and not necessarily a hugely dangerous one, one model for example predicts an increased cratering rate of no more than 5 percent. But we do live in a cosmic shooting gallery on a planet that has been hit many times before so anything could happen. But let's not get excited, we're talking about an event 1.35 million years in the future. By that time, if we're still here, we would likely be a highly advanced civilization that could easily deflect comets, in fact we're not far from that ability with our current technology, and there may be nothing to deflect at all since by that time we may have scoured the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt for raw materials leaving nothing left behind and allowing Gliese 710 to pass by harmlessly.

By why waste such a great opportunity? Gliese 710 is, after all, a huge ball of free energy heading our way. Why not colonize it? We could found a second human stellar colony by building a dyson sphere or swarm around gliese 710. Sounds good. But, over time this colony would grow increasingly distant unless we figured out a way to eventually, over geologic time scales, sync up the two star systems. While moving stars is not impossible, you can build megastructures that redirect stellar radiation to become thrust and accomplish it. But it takes enormous amounts of time so we would instead likely wave a long, slow goodbye to our new colony. And while that might be sad, it could also be a blessing if the two cultures end up not getting along.

An A.I. That Can Compose Music

Something tells me that it won't quite measure up to human music ...

https://sputniknews.com/science/201701171049688959-robot-that-can-write-a-symphony/

The Origins of Language Predates Humans

Language is a tricky and fascinating thing. On the one hand, it could be said to be one of the defining features of our species. We talk, therefore we are intelligent. And it's something we all do, wherever you find a group of humans you will find a language. But language is not unique to us, our cousin species the Neanderthals had a hyoid bone almost identical to our own thus they probably also had complex speech. But there are also plenty of indicators that whales, dolphins and even elephants may have their own forms of language as well, some of them apparently quite complex.

How we actually developed language is a huge mystery, one that will probably remain largely lost to the mists of time. But it's worth noting that language is distinct from communication, which is a much more broad term. Most animals can be said to communicate, even if just through chemical signals or body language. But a new study on baboons seems to suggest that the origins of human language actually predates us, at least physically.

A joint French-American team led by Dr. Louis-Jean Boe studied the vocalizations and mouth and throat anatomy of over 1300 Guinea baboons. And while the sounds these animals make may seem very different than human speech, the scientists found that present in the baboon's alarm or breeding calls were vowel sounds similar to those of humans coinciding with another earlier study on monkeys that identified 5 separate vowel sounds in their vocalizations. By extension, this would suggest that the origins of human speech could go back further than 25 million years.

This calls into question a group of long-standing theories regarding the development of language. The general idea was that language wasn't possible until the appearance of modern humans with our low or descended larynx. That means that the appearance of language coincided with our appearance. This in itself has been called into question before in that it's not actually a unique feature to us, it's known for example that certain species of deer also have a similar low larynx. It may actually be that the descended larynx of homo sapiens is not as important as once thought in the development of complex language.

Instead, it may be more about the structure of the tongue and that our vocal system actually developed from structures already present in more primitive primate species such as the baboons in the study, at least as far as forming vowel sounds are concerned which is a key component of speech. But vowels are only one component, how consonants evolved is still not well understood.
But I suppose none of this should be surprising. One only has to spend an hour with a talking bird to be blown away by their powers of speech. It gets even stranger when you contemplate that the talking parrot you're looking at is a descendent of the dinosaurs and has a vocal system entirely different from our own. Or go on YouTube and you'll find a myriad of videos of various animals seemingly trying to vocalize something.

And while most of this activity would simply be imitation, sometimes it may be more. There are old videos of dolphins apparently being taught to count using their blow hole and also videos of chimpanzees dynamically using another form of human language, sign language, in a way that's far more than imitation. I've included some links to some of these videos in the description below, it really is quite extraordinary and shows that rudimentary vocalization is not solely the domain of humans.

But being me, I have to go off the rails and take it a step further and wonder about aliens. I can't help but to ask if language, as in verbal speech, is something we're going to find in alien species. They would have to have some sort of method of communicating with each other to create a technological civilization, but does it need to be vocal? No, it can work like sign language does and be visual. Aliens do not necessarily need powers of speech for complex communications. It could even have evolved to be chemical. Or it could even be accomplished through bioluminescence like a kind of biological Morse code. Or it could be digital.

To go even further off the rails and into the world of futurism, I'll suggest that some day humans may stop speaking at all and simply communicate wirelessly - I won't use the word telepathically - between chips implanted in our heads. Entire thought conversations could be held without saying a word. Or we may choose not to pursue that technology because the idea is just too creepy. It remains to be seen.


But the one thing we will share with aliens however are things that are the same across the universe like mathematics, physics, chemistry and so on. Science is the built-in language of the universe and through it establishing communications with alien races is possible. We can announce our presence, and so can they. Conversation, however, is a different matter and any kind of conversation would be maddeningly slow.

Life on Venus? Venera D Update of 01/14/2017

You could say that Venus is the forgotten world of the inner solar system. Outshined, figuratively, by her superficially more interesting brother Mars, Venus holds both the potential for microbial life and the eventual potential of terraforming and human colonization. And, as I pointed out in my video "Colonizing and Terraforming Venus" it has advantages that Mars does not. But that forgotten status may soon change if a new space probe targeting the planet is approved.

Its name is Venera D after the venerable soviet-era Russian probes and landers of the 1970's and 80's that brought us the first pictures from the surface of Venus. And while Venus has not been a high priority for NASA, they have their eyes on Mars, RosCosmos has never lost interest in Venus and hopefully will collaborate with NASA on this mission and once again visit earth's sister world launching in 2025.

The mission, as planned right now, would include an orbiter designed to study both the atmosphere and surface in detail from orbit using powerful radar, but also to deploy a robust lander on the surface. And it would need to be robust, the rough conditions of the surface have only allowed for previous probes to survive for less than a few hours.

Possible additions to the mission include a drone designed to cruise the clouds of Venus, a second micro orbiter for studying Venus' magnetosphere, such as it is given that it basically borrows one from the sun, and even a high altitude balloon.

There are many reasons to study Venus' atmosphere directly. One reason is that for some unknown reason the atmosphere rotates significantly faster than the planet does. This super-rotation was discovered by studying an even stranger phenomenon. Within Venus' atmosphere there are dark streaks that display some strange properties. After knowing about the streaks since the 1960's to this day we have no idea what they are or why they are there.

The streaks are odd. They should have long ago mixed in with the atmosphere and disappeared. They have not. And, even stranger, they absorb ultraviolet light which somewhat restricts what they could be made of. We know nothing about their composition, but one possibility is that they are made up of iron chloride. Think of it as a kind of atmospheric ice, sort of like ice crystals in earth's atmosphere but in the much hotter conditions of Venus.

The problem with that theory is that the iron chloride would need to be coming from the surface. The trouble is there doesn't appear to be a way for that to happen, Venus' winds in the lower dense atmosphere are too weak. It could also be some other chemical dissolved or partially dissolved in Venus' atmosphere, but again, how it hasn't mixed in with the rest of the atmosphere is unknown. Given that the explanations thus far aren't very good, it's worth considering another possibility. Microbial life.

Microbes living in an atmosphere is nothing new. We find tons of them in earth's atmosphere. More, while Venus is extraordinarily hot, one area of it isn't. There is a region about 30 to 40 miles above the surface of Venus where the temperature and atmospheric pressure is earth-like. This also seems to be the location of the dark streaks. Intriguing indeed. And, oddly enough earlier Venera missions did detect some kind of elongated particles in the atmosphere that were about the right size for a bacterium.

But there's a huge hurdle. Venus' atmosphere is loaded with sulfuric acid. This is nasty stuff that life would have a hard time with. That is, unarmored life. Within Venus' atmosphere interesting molecules have been found that are called S8 molecules. Made up of a ring of sulfur atoms, these molecules are immune to the effects of sulfuric acid. If Venera's particles are indeed bacteria, they could have incorporated S8 during their evolution and essentially armored themselves.

Even more interesting is the fact that S8 does absorb ultraviolet light, meaning that it could be the culprit for the streaks. It's even been suggested that the presence of the S8 could be a direct result of microbial life. Because of all of this, an investigation of the potential for life in Venus' atmosphere is being looked at as one of the Venera D mission objectives.

Key to this however would be the drone. Balloons are hard to maneuver, so to get to the layer where the bacteria might be you would need a controllable aircraft. This is not so far fetched as you might think, it should be easily possible to build a solar powered UAV filled with hydrogen as a sort of hybrid balloon/airplane, something like a blimp.

Northrop Grumman has a concept for just such a vehicle. Known as VAMP or the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform, it would be  huge with a 180 foot wingspan and a mission length of an entire year without ever landing. It would deploy from the orbiter and fall like a leaf through Venus' atmosphere until reaching the optimum altitude for the mission and then essentially fly anywhere in the atmosphere we need to go with a 100 lb capacity for scientific instruments.

A final plan for the mission will be submitted at the end of this month. An answer whether NASA and Roscosmos wish to accept the mission and collaborate will come at the end of 2017 or sometime in 2018. 

Check out this awesome photo taken by a satellite above Antarctica. The tiny line you see is a convoy of supply trucks moving across the ice.

http://www.space.com/35305-antarctic-lifeline-seen-from-space.html

A New Star in the Night Sky? Update 01/07/2017 and an announcement!

You could say that I have a love affair with the night sky. Since I was a little kid, I have looked to the stars with wonder. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was seeing the night sky burning brightly in a remote Colorado sky unencumbered by any city lights. As I got older, that love affair extended to telescopes and amateur astronomy and continues to this day. But the one thing that's remained constant across my life is the generally unchanging nature of the night sky, other than the movements of the planets and the occasional comet.

That's about to change. A new star is  about to appear in our sky in the northern hemisphere, and it could be among the brightest, at least for a while. But first some history. When new stars suddenly appear in the sky humans take notice. In the year 1054 a star in the constellation Taurus went supernova and lit up the night sky in a big way, to the point that it was visible in daylight.

Numerous cultures took note of this star and recorded the event and it is now enshrined in the oral traditions of several cultures along with written accounts from Europe and the middle east. There's even a Native American pictograph thought to depict it. But the most detailed preserved accounts come from Chinese astronomers of the period who poetically called it a "guest star". 

The guest star faded over time, but you can still see the remnant of this supernova in a telescope or a pair of binoculars. It's called the crab nebula and represents the shell of gas thrown out by the supernova explosion. More recently, the southern hemisphere was treated to a similar supernova in 1987 located on the outskirts of the tarantula nebula. At the time I was 12 years old and was very sad because it wasn't visible in the northern hemisphere where I live. But that's now okay as something similar to this event seems set to happen again. And it's going to happen soon.

Researchers at Calvin College in Michigan have predicted that a star, currently being called the "Boom Star", in the constellation of Cygnus will dramatically brighten in the year 2022. If the prediction holds, it will become one of the brightest objects in the sky for about six months before calming back down and returning to its normal brightness after about 2 years.

The real name of the star is KIC 9832227 and it's located at a distance of about 1800 light-years. The system is made up of two suns that orbit very closely, so much so that their "year" is only eleven hours. That orbital speed has been shown to be slowing down. This means that these two stars are on a collision course.

We've seen stars collide before, it's a fairly predictable event. But what's rare is for it to happen so close. In the cosmic scheme of things, 1800 light-years isn't far at all. When the collision happened, for example, the Roman Empire was in full swing. But when they do collide to form a new, larger star, lots of light is emitted as the two suns coalesce.

That's good news for us. While the collision poses no danger to us, it will treat us to a spectacular display of a new star shining brightly in the sky that we can watch dim in real time. It's a new guest star and I for one welcome it. I just hope there's no civilizations closer to it that might not be so lucky.

Lastly, and completely unrelated, I would like to announce something special I have planned for 2017 for this channel. While I'm not yet sure if I'll stream it live or just take a bunch of footage and make a video, something extraordinary is happening in my area this year and I'm going to bring you along to enjoy it with me.

On Monday, August 21st, 2017 I will be within the path of a total solar eclipse and I will be setting up cameras and covering it on YouTube. I've been waiting for this eclipse for decades so I'll probably be beside myself with excitement, which isn't really saying much given that I'm sort of mellow, but I'll record that too. So there's much to look forward to on this channel for 2017 and I wish all of you a positive, prosperous and happy new year as together we boldly march into the future.

Study Crashes Main Moon Formation Theory

It seems there is a rethink regarding the formation of the moon going on.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-crashes-main-moon-formation-theory-162207822.html

An Amazing Picture of Earth

This article has one of the neatest images I've seen in a while. It was taken by a spacecraft in orbit of Mars!

http://www.space.com/35252-earth-and-moon-from-mars-photo.html 

Are Aliens Trying to Say Hello? Fast Radio Bursts Update 01/05/17

One of the strangest mysteries of the universe that continues to baffle astronomers are the phenomena of fast radio bursts or FRBs. Lasting only a few milliseconds, these highly energetic bursts have only been known since about 2001. And while we don't yet know much about them, we can infer from their behavior that the sources of the bursts seem to be very small. So small in fact that the sources must be less than a few hundred miles across. This eliminates a lot of possibilities as potential sources of the activity, including most normal stars, sending us into another tier of explanations, none of them particularly good so far. One of those potential explanations are the activities of alien civilizations.

Unexplained radio signals from space are nothing new, the universe is teeming with natural radio emitting objects. But in the case of FRBs, they behave very strangely and one research team suggested in 2015 that they seem to conform to a mathematical pattern, at least as far as the bursts known at the time were concerned. If present, that pattern doesn't really make much sense as far as our understanding of cosmology goes. And to add icing to the cake, they appear to originate invariably, again so far, from only outside our galaxy. A head-scratcher indeed.

They seem to be distant because of a metric known as the dispersion measure. The FRB's emit the same thing at many frequencies at once. Think of it as a radio station that beams out the same radio show on all frequencies on the dial. But those frequencies do not all travel at the same speed, some of the waves get delayed by floating electrons in space. This has the effect of higher frequencies crossing space faster than lower ones. The bigger the difference in time between the two, the further away the origin of the burst is.

As it turns out, the origins for the FRBs seems very distant. And new research suggests they are very common, with thousands happening each day. The reason we don't see them is because they happen so fast that we can only catch them by chance. More, just a few days ago research came out that found one that repeats. This eliminates one of the main natural explanations, that of colliding neutron stars.

But even stranger, there is another kind of reported pattern to these bursts. In 2015, researchers Michael Hippke and John Learned determined that of the 10 or so FRB's known at the time, the delay between the arrival of the first and last parts of the signals are always multiples of the number 187.5. No known natural process can do that. But, the pattern may not actually be real, more on that in a minute.

If that pattern is present, it might imply that the sources of the bursts line up at regularly spaced distances from earth. This is very difficult to explain with a natural explanation if we take the data at face value, so much so that alien activity is the easy explanation in much the same way that finding distance marker signs on a road would indicate human activity. The odds are in the alien's favor in this case and are estimated to be 5 in 10,000 that this pattern would just be due to chance.

But don't get excited yet, we could be misinterpreting the data. And subsequent observations of FRB's since 2015 do not line up with the pattern, calling the whole thing into question. Why the first ten did and the subsequent bursts did not is a complete mystery but the current consensus is that the pattern wasn't really there and that the effect was a statistical flaw from having too small of a sampling to go on.  

It could also be that the sources for the FRBs are in reality much closer to home. They could have galactic origins and merely present the appearance of being billions of light-years away by emitting long frequency waves before emitting short ones on a delay. Or they could be even closer, it has been suggested that the FRBs are emissions from our own spy satellites that we're accidentally picking up. This is particularly interesting because a group of FRB-like signals that had been detected by a single radio telescope were thought to be originating from space. It turns out, they weren't. They were coming from the microwave oven in the lunch room.  

Another possibility is that superdense stellar remnants could be the sources, though this explanation is somewhat weak because it's based on the fact that we really don't know very much about the physics of how those produce radio waves. Other potential explanations include oddly behaving solar flares, activity around black holes, and many others. So it's best not to run to the alien explanation just yet.

There's a good reason for this other than skepticism. While sending out engineered signals that contain mathematical patterns would be a logical way to announce your presence to the universe, there are a lot cheaper ways to do it. FRBs, if they originate outside the Milky Way, would take a huge amount of energy to produce, about the same amount our sun produces in a month or more.

In addition to that the signals are pretty ambiguous, they don't really look like something aliens would intentionally send. If your aim was to wow other civilizations with your math skills, you'd probably do something less ambiguous, such as base a message on Pi or simply count out numbers like they did in the movie "Contact". And you would do it on selected frequencies as opposed to eating up energy by blasting the signal out on a wide spectrum of frequencies as is the case with FRBs.

No two frequencies are the same where interstellar communications are concerned. Certain ones, such as the hydrogen line that SETI places a high value on are better at tagging your signal as a dead ringer for being artificial than other frequencies. What you wouldn't do is intentionally make your communication questionable as in the case of FRBs. You'd want your signal to be loud and clear and easily understood as artificial. This is not so with the FRBs.

But that's all based on the assumption that alien signals would come in the form of communications. But, if we are any indicator, that would not be true in most cases. The fact is we've only sent out a few intentional signals and we have a nasty habit of not repeating them, which is one of the criteria SETI requires to call an alien signal an alien signal, it must repeat and be independently verifiable by other scientists. In reality most of our radio signals that aliens might pick up would be random things like radar. So that begs a question, if artificial, what if the FRBs are not designed for communications at all?

Enter in a paper released on January 5th of 2017 by Manasvi Lingham and Abraham Loeb that lays out just such an alien scenario that seems consistent with the data where a specific type of alien activity would fit. Their idea is that the FRBs might be extremely powerful for a reason: they are pushing sails.

They have determined that the frequencies where we see the FRBs just happen to be those perfect for pushing spacecraft connected to huge sails. They suggest that the beams powering them sweep by very rapidly explaining the short duration of the bursts and that if they are indeed pushing spacecraft we should see that in the light curves of the bursts. They also note that not all FRBs need to be of alien origin, some may be natural or they may all be natural. Only time and more research will tell. 

Lingham and Loeb's Paper of 01/05/2017

https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109

Hippke and Learned's Paper from 2015

https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245