TheSloan Digital Sky Surveytelescope at dark . paradigm course credit : Patrick Galume
It ’s a bold claim : A Canadian astronomer says he ’s found not just one alien signal from a far - away worldly concern , but 234 of them . Ermanno Borra , an uranologist at Laval University , together with his graduate student Eric Trottier , has comb out through data from 2.5 million stars , provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey . Buried in the light from some of those genius was an unusual signal — pair of light-headed pulses , less than 2 trillionths of a second apart , with no obvious instinctive stemma .
“ The strange matter is that , out of more than 2 million stars , we only found it [ the pulses ] in 234 star — and those stars look a picayune bit like the Sun , ” Borra tellsmental_floss . He add that he and Trottier were careful to find out the most obvious causes of a false signal — instrument error and faulty data psychoanalysis . In their paper [ PDF ] , uploaded to the ArXiv server to begin with this calendar month and subsequentlypublishedinPublications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific , they also point out that if the signaling were due to a systematic error , it would show up in all stars , and in galaxies and quasar ; instead , it seems to only show up in Sun - alike stars . They also deal the possible action that the signal is triggered by atmospheric phenomenon on the aerofoil of the stars .
“ The signaling is real , ” Borra says . “ Still , it ’s not 100 percent sure that it come from ETI [ Extraterrestrial Intelligence ] . ” He say that that ’s “ the most likely account , but of course , more employment needs to be done . ”
Borra had speculated in a2012 paperthat luxuriously - powered lasers were a plausible means for advanced civilizations to communicate , and that if aliens wanted to announce their presence to Earthlings , they could aim a laser in our direction and use a pulsed sign to get our attention . Such signal , he argued , could be picked out by a careful analysis of the spectra collected by all - sky adept surveys . Their new paper , he state , is coherent with that approximation .
In the new paper , they account pairs of opthalmic pulses come just 1.65 picosecond apart ( one picosecond is one one-trillionth of a second ) . The couplet themselves appear to come in a few msec asunder , but not in any specific pattern .
The astronomic community is reacting with measured mental rejection .
“ It ’s a signal that ’s not like anything we ’re familiar with in nature — but then the question is , might it be make by something other than ET ? ” asksDouglas Vakoch , an stargazer and president of METI International , a research and educational institute dedicated to both SETI and METI . ( SETI stands for " hunting for extraterrestrial intelligence " ; in METI , the M stands for " message . " )
Vakoch tellsmental_flossthat for him , the strangest part of Borra ’s study is the fact that each of the 234 lead is sending precisely the same sort of pulsing , with the same periodicity . If these signals uprise with exotic civilizations , he ruminate , then they ’ve on the face of it formed a “ galactic club ” that ’s announcing its presence in a unified fashion . He conceive this a somewhat far - fetched idea .
Further penetration will descend when astronomers with theBreakthrough Listen Initiativeuse the 2.4 - meter telescope at Lick Observatory in California to see if they can retroflex the watching . If they come through , says Vakoch , it “ still would n’t say you that it ’s ET , but at least it would be a confirmation [ of the signaling ] . ”
He recalls that back when pulsars were let on , the first of these strange radio - wave sources , pick out in 1967 , was playfully dubbed “ LGM-1 , ” for “ Little Green Men . ” We now have a go at it that pulsars are rapidly spinning , dense stars that periodically send bursts of radio undulation toward Earth .
The lesson is that what looks alien might just be nature doing something we ’re not intimate with . “ The universal mindset in SETI is that , before you say it ’s an extraterrestrial intelligence , you have to recollect really creatively about what the natural explanations might be — and I cogitate it ’s way too too soon in the secret plan to jump to the conclusion that it ’s extraterrestrial intelligence , ” say Vakoch . Still , he says : “ It ’s good that this data is out there , so we can follow up on it . ”
