Trevor Collins

And our plan is going, what the hell was that?

I mean, you think of like early days, cell phone towers, and you're like, ah, it's cloudy, man.

I can't get a good signal.

Maybe we were just the cloud for a little bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Man.

Okay, one other small theory has to do with the wildness of space.

Researchers have proposed that a standard faint radio burst, something from a celestial object, common radio burst kind of activity,

might have gone through the process known as gravitational lensing.

If you've ever seen the movie Interstellar, you'll see how wormholes or black holes bend the space around them.

And you can actually and this is how we've been able to see galaxies incredibly far away.

Oh, my God, this is so hard to explain because it's so mind blowing.

But if if there's a galaxy between us and a further away galaxy, if it's just right, the light from the galaxy further away can bend around the closer galaxy

bend around it like a lens, collapse back in on the other side, and then come to us looking like it's magnified.

So you can literally use the gravity, the mass of a black hole or a galaxy, and you can use that as a magnifying glass to look at and listen to things on the other side.

You following?

Basically, in this case, they're saying the radio waves were emitted by something normal.

just a light burst, nothing super strong, but they happened to pass by something with an incredible mass could be a star, could be a black hole, could be another galaxy.

And it perfectly came by rap like the radio waves bent around that mass and magnified.

So that way, when it hit us, it looked like a uniquely strong radio signal, but actually it was just like an amped up normal signal.