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SCIENTISTS are investigating unexplainable bursts of radio waves that could be messages from alien life forms, after an Australian team stumbled upon the phenomenon.

Ten of the bizarre flashes have been picked up by radio telescope over the past 15 years, displaying a mathematical pattern that has bamboozled experts, in a real-life version of the 1997 sci-fi film Contact.

Lasting just a few milliseconds, the radio bursts erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month, New Scientist reports.

It all started last year at the CSIRO’s Parkes Telescope in central-west New South Wales, which last year picked up a radio burst in real-time, a world first that sparked a hunt through data that unearthed nine similar events.

What makes them so unusual is that the delay between the arrival of the first and last waves of each burst is always close to a multiple of 187.5, a mathematical phenomenon for which no explanation has been found.

The brevity of the bursts, and the distance between their lower and higher frequency waves, means they are likely to come from a source that is both extremely small — hundreds of kilometres across at most — and very far away, possibly in another galaxy.

The analysis was undertaken by Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, who concluded that there was a 5 in 10,000 probability of the mathematical phenomenon being a coincidence.

The researchers explored several possible explanations for the fast bursts of radio waves

(FRBs).

The first is simply the limitations of human knowledge; it could be that we simply haven’t come far enough in our understanding of physics.

Alternatively, human technology such as an unmapped spy satellite could be to blame.

Or the source of the bursts could be an extraterrestrial beacon, a signal from aliens attempting to get our attention — as explored in the film Contact.

However, it is possible the bursts came from a more ordinary, earthly source. Initially unexplained pulses picked up by the Parkes Telescope in 2010 turned out to come not from an intergalactic source, but from a microwave in the site’s kitchen.

While the scientists at the facility quickly clued onto the nature of the signals, which differ from FRBs, it’s a perfect illustration of how a perfectly ordinary phenomenon can confound even the most highly trained scientific mind — albeit only briefly.

The culprit? A worker who went to nuke their lunch and opened the microwave door prematurely, causing a pulse that mimics some of the characteristics of an astrophysical burst.

This did not detract from the scientists’ conclusion that the FRBs they have been studying were emitted from another galaxy.

However, it does seem pertinent to remember the philosophical principal of Occam’s razor.

Also known as the law of parsimony, it states: “The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”