The universe is awash with strange radio signals, but astronomers have now detected a really bizarre one that repeats every hour, cycling through three different states. While they have some ideas about its origin it can’t be explained by our current understanding of physics.
The title here is a little misleading. A signal that repeated once per hour, as in 60 minutes, would be pretty astounding, and might be a good way for a civilization with enough information about us to say ‘hi’ in a way we’d recognize. It would certainly be very strange to see a natural phenomenon ticking away the hours at a precise rate.
53.8 minutes, on the other hand, is a bit less attention grabbing.
I’d argue that a more precise timing like 53.8 minutes is more attention grabbing. It shows finer grained control of technology; a “look here! we can do this too!” sort of demonstration.
If we are the “more advanced” neighbor; then I could see that being done.
It’s more that their knowing what an hour is would be impressive. Our selection of the hour as a measure of time is arbitrary outside of its specific context. It’s just 1/24th of our planet’s rotational period. We could just as easily split the day up into 10ths or 15ths or 7ths or whatever.
To broadcast a signal that’s exactly an hour long to a planet that uses the hour as a measure of time might potentially imply someone trying to reference our way of measuring time. A signal that repeats every 53.8 minutes is on a timer that isn’t specifically relevant to Earth in the same way an hour exactly would be.
That signal might be insignificant to us; but it may be their way of establishing a timescale.
The time may be derived from how long their planet takes to rotate…aka the length of one sub-unit of their day…aka 1/24th of their day.
Or, it could be the periodicity of the lifecycle of a cool bug they like, or it could be just a random period from any huge number of celestial objects we have yet to categorize. I have a guess for which of these options it is, personally.
Such a cycle is a cycle like any other. It’s not “more precise” when it’s shorter.
We attribute the 53.8 according to our scale.