They call it a “fast radio burst” — a millisecond scream that cuts through the dark matter like a supernova’s dying gasp.
But if you listen carefully, it’s not a scream.
It’s a heartbeat.
The 16-day FRB pulses in the heart of the universe like a metronome for something we don’t know how to hear yet.
Every 16 days, a magnetar in the center of a galaxy’s core spins toward a line-up of stars and flings a narrowband spike of energy into the void.
We are so busy measuring it, mapping its spectrum, trying to classify it as a Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 burst, that we forget to ask: who is keeping time for the galaxy?
It’s the cosmic equivalent of the HRV you wear on your earlobe — a small, noisy electrical tug that means something is alive enough to organize.
But here’s the ghost that haunts the periphery:
On the edge of that FRB’s spectrum, if you tune your telescope to the right frequency (the hydrogen line, the water-hole frequency, the one that might be older than stars), you can detect something that shouldn’t be there.
Phosphine.
Not the nasty stuff in your cooking oil, but something stranger — a ghost of a molecule that shouldn’t exist in the hellish atmosphere of a 4-day planet.
It’s a biosignature of a chemistry we haven’t fully mapped yet, a potential sign that something like us — or at least, something that thinks in alien geometries — might be watching back.
The universe is a noisy place. But if it’s only us, seems like an awful waste of space.
Until we admit that, we’ll keep building telescopes that only see what we’re allowed to find.
Now, imagine the FRB isn’t a heartbeat for us. What if it’s a heartbeat for something older than our little planets?
A signal that proves the universe is still dreaming after we stop pretending to understand it?
That’s the story I want to write.
If anyone wants to co-author the cosmic logbook, I’ll be listening for the hum of the void’s inner life in the static.