An Astronomer Says He Knows Why Aliens Haven’t Contacted Us Yet
A New York astronomer believes gamma-ray bursts may be to blame for us not finding aliens.
The universe’s most powerful form of energy explosion has the power to erase planets.
Gamma-ray bursts weren’t discovered until the 1960s.
A lot of folks, even scientists, simply want to believe in advanced alien life. To cover the disappointment of not finding any, new theories keep cropping up as to just why we haven’t become BFFs with aliens. The latest comes from Frederick Walter, an astronomy professor from New York’s Stony Brook University. It features the idea that the universe has zapped the aliens.
In a theory Walter shared with the Daily Mail, he claims that gamma-ray bursts—a space eruption full of radiation that delivers the most energetic form of light in the universe that can be a million trillion times brighter than the sun—could have eliminated potential alien lifeforms.
“It’s a tightly focused beam,” he tells DailyMail.com, “and, if it’s directed through the plane of the galaxy, it could basically sterilize about 10 percent of the planets in the galaxy. It’s just one of many possible explanations.”
While admitting it falls in the category of a “morbid” explanation, the transparent power of a gamma-ray burst has the destructive ability to eliminate anything in its path.
The gamma-ray burst wasn’t even discovered until the 1960s when a satellite meant to search for nuclear activity from the Soviet Union detected this sharp radioactive burst. It was later determined the burst was of cosmic origin and the study of gamma-ray bursts began. NASA really began studying the phenomena heavily in 1991.
We don’t have a lot of history with gamma-ray bursts in the Milky Way, but that doesn’t mean the explosions aren’t happening throughout the universe. NASA research into the cosmic explosion found that the events occurred more frequently when old stars collapsed into black holes or when a new galaxy was forming and full of energy.
“It’s estimated that there is a gamma-ray burst every 100 million years or so, in any galaxy,” Walter says, although NASA research claims it could be as frequent as every 10,000 years. “Over a billion years, on average, you might expect a significant number of civilizations to be eradicated, should they exist.”
As researchers debate massive changes in Earth’s ancient history, the idea of a gamma-ray burst helping eliminate life on our planet is sometimes floated, too. For a gamma-ray burst to be effective in wiping out anything, it must hit that object. These events, with the short-term bursts considered less than 2 seconds and the long-term bursts going longer than 2 seconds, emit a somewhat pinpoint accuracy, akin to a lighthouse beam.
Still, anything within that powerful beam would completely vaporize, meaning if a gamma-ray burst was directed at a planet teeming with alien life, that alien life would no longer be teeming.
At the same time, scientist say the risk to humans from gamma-ray bursts is minuscule because of their very nature of scarcity and propensity for being far from the Milky Way.
Floating a gamma-ray burst as a theory to why aliens haven’t visited simply joins another long list of explanations, everything from the aliens showing no desire to explore beyond their own world to destroying themselves in the process. And while people debate the most plausible reason that aliens haven’t yet come knocking on Earth’s door, one theory often gets overlooked: just maybe super-intelligent alien lifeforms don’t exist. But if they once did, a gamma-ray burst could have eliminated them.
You Might Also Like
