“We were looking for a signal that would prove that this object incorporates some technology …”
An artist’s depiction of interstellar object ‘Oumuamua ESA/Hubble; NASA; ESO; M. Kornmesser
MOUNTAIN VIEW – It’s the first time a visitor from another star system has been seen nearby. But what is it? An asteroid, a comet … or an alien artifact?
Scientists at the SETI Institute have attempted to address this question by using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to observe ‘Oumuamua when it was about 170 million miles away, or slightly less than the diameter of Earth’s orbit. The intention was to measure artificial radio transmissions which, if found, would be strong evidence that this object is not simply a rock tossed into space by a random gravitational slingshot interaction that occurred in its home star system.
“We were looking for a signal that would prove that this object incorporates some technology – that it was of artificial origin,” says Gerry Harp, lead author of a paper to be published in the February 2019 issue of Acta Astronautica. “We didn’t find any such emissions, despite a quite sensitive search. While our observations don’t conclusively rule out a non-natural origin for ‘Oumuamua, they constitute important data in assessing its likely makeup.”
Following its discovery in October 2017, ‘Oumuamua was the subject of popular speculation about a possible non-natural origin largely because it brought to mind the interstellar spaceship in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama. Its highly elongated shape and the fact that no coma was observed strengthened this hypothesis for some, as these are uncharacteristic of asteroids and comets.
A recent paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by researchers at Harvard has also suggested the possibility that ‘Oumuamua is a deliberate construction. The Harvard researchers argue that the slight, unexpected acceleration observed for this object could be caused by pressure from sunlight as ‘Oumumua swung around the Sun. Their hypothesis is that the object might be a light sail, either deliberately or accidentally sent our way. A deliberate origin is considered somewhat more likely because our solar system is a very small target for any object that is not being aimed.
Such arguments strengthen the importance of observations such as those conducted on the ATA that can constrain the true nature of ‘Oumuamua.
Observations were made between November 23 and December 5, 2017, using the wide-band correlator of the ATA at frequencies between 1 and 10 GHz and with a frequency resolution of 100 kHz. No signals were found at a level that would be produced by an omnidirectional transmitter on-board the object of a power of about 10 watts or more. In portions of the radio spectrum that are routinely cluttered by artificial satellite telemetry, the threshold for detection was higher. In all cases, these limits to the powers that could be detected are quite modest – comparable to that of a citizen band radio.
While no signals were found coming from ‘Oumuamua, the types of observations reported by SETI Institute scientists may have utility in constraining the nature of any interstellar objects detected in the future, or even the small, well-known objects in our own Solar System. It has been long-hypothesized that some of the latter could be interstellar probes, and radio observations offer a way to address this imaginative, but by no means impossible, idea.
Every summer for the past 20 years, Pascal Lee has traveled to the remote Canadian Arctic to pretend he’s on Mars. This cold, dry, pockmarked and essentially lifeless environment is one of the closest to the red planet that you can find on Earth—making it a great practice ground for driving Mars rovers.
Lee, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute in California, is the director of the NASA Haughton Mars Project, where he uses this analog Mars environment to investigate scientific questions concerning how humans might threaten life on other planets we colonize.
For example, if humans travel to Mars, would microbes transferred from our bodies thrive on Martian soil—threatening native Martian microbes and disrupting native ecosystems? Recent results from Lee’s research suggest the answer to that is no, at least not on the surface of Martian soil: Mars’ harsh climate and high UV radiation would kill off many of the microbes we may accidentally bring from Earth.
But the Haughton Mars Project—along with other Mars analog study sites in Antarctica and the Atacama Desert in Chile—also inadvertently bring to light numerous ethical questions of how we should behave as interplanetary colonists. As humans accelerate their space travel capacity and aim to colonize Mars in the next several decades, these questions are becoming less lofty and more immediately urgent.
Here’s another scenario: If humans were to land on Mars and were somehow lethally threatened by Martians, should humans attack the Martians? In his personal opinion, Lee says the answer would be yes. “If at some point it came down to either me or the microbe on Mars that’s going to survive, I’m probably not going to hesitate,” he says.
Yet these are not simple questions to address, and are not within the realm of the Haughton Mars Project to answer. The International Council for Science, consisting of 142 countries, has organized a Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) to help answer some of these questions and a United Nations Outer Space Treaty, in place since 1967, also helps streamline some of the ethical and legal implications that this issue raises.
But the treaty is meant to protect the safety of humans and scientific evidence of life on other planets, not to protect the environments or ecosystems of those planets. Moreover, the contents of the treaty are just guidelines: They are not laws, and the legal implications of not following them remain unclear, says Catharine Conley, head officer at NASA’s Planetary Protection Office.
“The peer pressure approach has, up until now, worked,” she says, explaining that it’s in space agencies’ best interest to work together since they often rely on each other for collaboration and advancement. But now, as more private companies like SpaceX enter the field to visit Mars, the playing field has changed.
“When you have other entities included that don’t have those same long term science objectives, it gets more complicated,” says Conley.
A rover-like vehicle driving through the remote Arctic for the Haughton Mars Project.
Under the current treaty guidelines, federal governments are responsible for the behavior of both their space agencies and nongovernmental space entities in their country. So a company like SpaceX must be authorized to launch by a government agency before lift off—but if it accidentally or intentionally fails to comply with the treaty guidelines at some point in flight, another country could theoretically sue the U.S. government or take other legal actions, says Conley.
Despite general good intentions and hard work to keep spacecraft free of contaminants, Conley says the biggest threat humans pose to other planets is what we don’t know—or what we think we know, but don’t. While research from the Haughton Mars Project suggests limited microbial transfer from rovers to Mars soil, other dynamics could exist on Mars or other planets that researchers haven’t even thought to anticipate.
“For certain types of Earth organisms, Mars is a gigantic dinner plate,” says Conley. “We don’t know, but it could be that those organisms would grow much more rapidly than they would on Earth because they have this unaffected environment and everything is there for them to use.”
So far, most of the attention to these ethical issues has focused on Mars, the most realistic subject of colonization in the near future. But other types of planets may bring up new concerns. “You can invent all kinds of scenarios, but the problem is currently it’s all open because no one has explored these things before,” says Conley, referring to the legal implications of contaminating Mars or another planet. “So until you have a case, you can’t decide what to do. But of course from the standpoint of planetary protection, as soon as you have a case, something has already gone wrong.”
There are also dangers that fall beyond the realm of planetary protection. Take energy production: In order for humans to live on another planet, we will need to develop a way to produce electricity. A substance called perchlorate exists in relatively high quantities on Mars (and also on Earth in bleach and other substances), making up about 1 percent of all the dust on the red planet. This highly energetic salt could potentially offer a good source of energy for humans on Mars, but not if humans accidentally introduce a microbe that eats it up before we have a chance to use it, says Conley.
Unfortunately, the guidelines put in place by the Outer Space Treaty won’t necessarily prevent this type of mistake from happening. The guidelines are strict on keeping spacecraft clean when looking for life on other planets, but less stringent for spacecraft traveling to a celestial body for other reasons. This is because planetary protection guidelines exist to preserve scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life—not the environments of other planets, says Gerhard Kminek, the planetary protection officer at the European Space Agency.
An artist’s interpretation of a human colony on Mars.
Working groups of COSPAR, including the Panel on Potentially Environmentally Detrimental Activities in Space, do explore how space activities might disrupt other planets’ environments. These panels report to the United Nations with their findings. But again, they only offer guidelines, not laws, says Kminek. So it’s up to international space agencies to recognize the importance of building best practices in spacecraft sanitation and keeping up with the sometimes onerous standards set by the Outer Space Treaty.
“If you do it badly once, that might be enough to compromise any future investigation related to life,” says Kminek. “And that’s why there is strong international consensus making sure there are no bad players around.”
The standards for travel also differ from one celestial body to another. For instance, Mars atmosphere is thick enough that it will burn off certain microbes upon entry—allowing spacecraft sanitation standards to remain laxer than they would be for vehicles landing somewhere with a very thin atmosphere, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, Kminek says.
That is, at least based on our understanding of these celestial bodies right now. During the Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s, we learned how unforeseen obstacles can cause critical problems in space travel. On the Moon, the threat lunar dust posed to astronauts was underestimated until it started getting stuck in the crevices of their face and in their zippers, jeopardizing the integrity of their spacesuits, says Margaret Race, a colleague of Conley’s at the SETI Institute.
“Had they been up there a little longer, their spacesuits would not have worked,” Race says.
Late astronaut and engineer Eugene Cernan, the last man to have walked on the Moon, stated the enormity of the dust problem during an Apollo 17 technical debrief in 1973: “I think dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the Moon,” he stated. “We can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems except dust.”
Humans also didn’t do a good job limiting the transport of material from Earth to the Moon or vice versa, says Race. The Moon is lifeless, so this had little consequence on either celestial body. But if the Moon harbored life and a transfer of species did occur, the consequences would have been far greater. “If there were life on the Moon, we would have it here now,” she says. “We did the best we could at the time, but we didn’t understand.”
While space engineering has come a long way since the Apollo missions, plenty of work remains to determine the best practices in protecting life on other planets from humans, says Conley. And when we do finally land on Mars, the advancements will need to continue—even if it appears that scientists have sufficient knowledge of human threat to other planets.
“My response to that is, as soon as you eat your first candy bar, do you stop brushing your teeth?” says Conley. “We should keep doing it.” Because, in the end, what we don’t know will end up being the most dangerous threat humans pose to these other worlds.
SETI is still scanning the skies for other galactic citizens
Fourteen years ago in Bremen, Germany, astronomer Seth Shostak gave a lecture that included a wager. “I bet everybody in the audience a cup of Starbucks that we would find E.T. within two dozen years,” he told a new audience in October. You don’t have to be a Klaatu-level math whiz to calculate that Shostak has 10 years left before he’d have to shell out for a lot of tall drips. I’m talking about the coffee.
Shostak is senior astronomer at the Center for SETI Research based in Mountain View, Calif. SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” of course, as the millions who have loaned out their home computer time for the SETI@home project know. He mentioned the wager at a session on the current state of the search for any signs of alien intelligence at the World Conference of Science Journalists in the San Francisco Bay Area. The SETI conversation in question took place on the University of California, Berkeley, campus. No protesters or extraterrestrials attended. Probably.
“To have some reasonable chance of success,” Shostak said, “you’d have to look at at least a million star systems.” Which may be possible within the coffee challenge’s time parameter, thanks to $100 million from Russian physicist and entrepreneur Yuri Milner in 2015 to establish what is called Breakthrough Listen—an effort to use multiple radio and optical telescopes to survey the million stars closest to us. (It recently came out that in 2015 Milner had invested in a start-up co-owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is a senior White House adviser. Perhaps Milner’s SETI funding represented his realization that looking for intelligent life in outer space was a better bet.)
Shostak thinks his Bremen audience comes out ahead either way. “Because either [by 2027] a signal has been found and you have something to talk about at lunch—or you get a cup of coffee. You can’t lose.”
But what about sending out messages inviting contact with intelligent aliens rather than just listening for incoming missives from faraway smarty-pants or whatever clothing may be appropriate for their anatomy? “I think the risks outweigh the benefits,” said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, which oversees Breakthrough Listen. “When advanced civilizations come in contact with less advanced civilizations, it hasn’t been good on Earth. So I think there’s a lot of risk.”
But Shostak thinks we already might have attracted somebody’s attention: “The kind of equipment that we have today is within four orders of magnitude of being able to detect radars on nearby worlds, within a few tens of light-years. Now this speed of increase in the collecting area of radio telescopes on Earth is roughly two orders of magnitude per century…. That means that any society that’s at least 200 years more advanced than we are has equipment that can pick up SFO, alright? That’s the local airport for those of you from out of town. So … if you really think there’s a potential of killing seven billion people because the aliens get ticked off by hearing I Love Lucy and send their interstellar battlewagons here to wipe us out…, you better turn off all the radars. Not for the weekend, not for this year, you better turn them off forever. And to me, that doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
Shostak also brought up a less frightening but perhaps more existentially dreadful possibility about some future first contact: what if we finally hear from aliens broadcasting their presence as sentient beings, and the big announcement is their understanding of well-known mathematical phenomena such as the Fibonacci sequence. “That would be a real bummer, wouldn’t it?” he asked. “I mean, we finally hear from E.T., and he tells us something you learned in 10th grade.”
Actually I’d be okay with it—and with them watching Lucy gobble chocolates off the conveyor belt. What I worry about is them catching the iconic Twilight Zone episode where the aliens show up with a manuscript entitled “To Serve Man,” and it ends up being a cookbook. Why give advanced carnivores any cravings?
In 2010, physicist Stephen Hawking voiced concern about the possibility that we might contact extraterrestrial life by transmitting signals into space.
However, SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak told us that it’s too late to consider whether we should send such transmissions, because we’ve already been doing it for decades.
‘It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations,’ a group of scientists looking for aliens have warned – but the signals are encouraging.
Scientists have heard hugely unusual messages from deep in space that they think are coming from aliens.
A new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars appears to indicate that it could be coming from extraterrestrial intelligence that is looking to alert us to their existence.
The new study reports the finding of specific modulations in just 234 out of the 2.5 million stars that have been observed during a survey of the sky. The work found that a tiny fraction of them seemed to be behaving strangely.
And there appears to be no obvious explanation for what is going on, leaving the scientists behind the paper to conclude that the messages are coming from aliens.
“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” write EF Borra and E Trottier in a new paper. “The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis,” the two scientists from Laval University in Quebec write.
The research has appeaed in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, under the title ‘Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars’. It appears to have been originally suggested for publication with the name ‘Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence’, according to a pre-print version of the paper hosted online.
But they make clear that further work will need to be done to confirm or deny that hypothesis. That will need to be done by watching for the same signals on different equipment so that all other explanations can be discarded.
Breakthrough Listen – an initiative set up this year to look for alien life and supported by people including Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg – said that the message was promising. But they said that further work will have to be done before they can be “unequivocally attributed” to aliens.
“The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study,” the team said in a statement. “However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
“It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations. Internationally agreed-upon protocols for searches for evidence of advanced life beyond Earth (SETI) require candidates to be confirmed by independent groups using their own telescopes, and for all natural explanations to be exhausted before invoking extraterrestrial agents as an explanation.
“Careful work must be undertaken to determine false positive rates, to rule out natural and instrumental explanations, and most importantly, to confirm detections using two or more independent telescopes.”
If intelligent aliens actually do live around Tabby’s star, astronomers are determined to find them.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative, which will spend $100 million over the next 10 years to hunt for signals possibly produced by alien civilizations, is set to begin studying Tabby’s star with the 330-foot-wide (100 meters) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, project team members announced Tuesday (Oct. 25).
“The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it’s the largest, most sensitive telescope that’s capable of looking at Tabby’s star given its position in the sky,” Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion, who also directs the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
“We’ve deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly,” Siemion added.
The observations will take place for 8 hours per night for three nights over the next two months, with the first observations set to take place Wednesday (Oct. 26), project team members said.
Tabby’s star, officially known as KIC 8462852, lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth. Observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope showed that the star dimmed dramatically several times over the past half-decade or so, at one point by a whopping 22 percent. These occasional brightness dips — which were first reported last year by a team led by Yale University postdoc Tabetha Boyajian (hence the star’s nickname) — are far too substantial to be caused by an orbiting planet, astronomers have said.
So researchers have offered up a number of alternative explanations for the dimming to date. Perhaps a cloud of comet fragments periodically blocks the star’s light, for example, or maybe some unknown structure in the depths of space between Earth and Tabby’s star is responsible.
It’s even possible that the brightness dips are caused by an “alien megastructure” — an enormous collection of energy-gathering solar panels, for example.
Astronomers have stressed that the megastructure hypothesis is a long shot, but long shots shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, Breakthough Listen team members said.
“I don’t think it’s very likely — a one-in-a-billion chance or something like that — but nevertheless, we’re going to check it out,” Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at Berkeley SETI, said in the same statement. “But I think that E.T., if it’s ever discovered, it might be something like that. It’ll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident … that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, ‘Hey, that’s a civilization.'”
A number of other research teams have already searched for signals coming from Tabby’s star, and all of those searches have come up empty so far.
Tabby’s star has provoked so much excitement over the past year, with speculation that it hosts a highly advanced civilization capable of building orbiting megastructures to capture the star’s energy, that UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the Green Bank radio telescope to see if it can detect any signals from intelligent extraterrestrials.
“The Breakthrough Listen program has the most powerful SETI equipment on the planet, and access to the largest telescopes on the planet,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and co-director of Breakthrough Listen. “We can look at it with greater sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other experiment in the world. ”
Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding over 10 years from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won’t be the first to search for intelligent life around this star.
“Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby’s star has looked at it,” he said. “It’s been looked at with Hubble, it’s been looked at with Keck, it’s been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found.”
While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star’s unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can’t not take a look. They’ve teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University.
The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three nights over the next two months, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion, Wright and Boyajian are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to start the observations, and expect to gather around 1 petabyte of data over hundreds of millions of individual radio channels.
“The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it’s the largest, most sensitive telescope that’s capable of looking at Tabby’s star given its position in the sky,” Siemion said. “We’ve deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly.”
The results of their observations will not be known for more than a month, because of the data analysis required to pick out patterns in the radio emissions.
First reported in September 2015 by Boyajian, then a postdoc at Yale University, Tabby’s star – more properly called KIC 8462852 – had been flagged by citizen scientists because of its unusual pattern of dimming. These volunteers were looking at stars as part of the internet project Planet Hunters, which allows the public to search for planets around other stars in data taken by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which has been monitoring 150,000 stars for regular dimming that might indicate a planet had passed in front of it.
But while most such dimming by transiting planets is brief, regular and blocks just 1 or 2 percent of the light of the star, Tabby’s star dims for days at a time, by as much as 22 percent, and at irregular intervals.
While Boyajian speculated in her 2015 paper that the irregular dimming might be explained by a swarm of comets breaking up as it approached the star, subsequent observations show the star, which is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, is far more irregular than a comet swarm would produce. In fact, it seems to have been dimming at a steady rate for the past century.
Speculation eventually arose that the dimming was caused by a Dyson structure: a massive orbiting array of solar collectors that physicist Freeman Dyson once proposed would be a natural thing for a civilization to build as it needed more and more energy to power itself. Theoretically, such a structure could completely surround the star – what he termed a Dyson sphere – and capture nearly all the star’s energy.
How likely is that? “I don’t think it’s very likely – a one in a billion chance or something like that – but nevertheless, we’re going to check it out,” said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at Berkeley SETI. “But I think that ET, if it’s ever discovered, it might be something like that. It’ll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident … that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, ‘Hey, that’s a civilization.'”
Breakthrough Listen is monitoring many other stars using three telescopes that can peer into all segments of the cosmos: the Parkes Telescope in Australia and the Green Bank Telescope to search for radio transmissions, and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California to search for optical laser transmissions.
Signal detected a year ago from HD164595, only 95 light years away and with at least one planet, but Seti scientists are scanning the area and have yet to find it
Seti scientists have been scanning the coordinates since Sunday night but have yet to find the signal.
As David Bowie might have sung: is there life on HD164595b?
A Russian radio telescope scanning the skies has observed “a strong signal” from a nearby star, HD164595, in the constellation Hercules. The star is a scant 95 light years away and 99% of the size of Earth’s own sun. It has at least one planet,HD164595b, which is about the size of Neptune and has a 40-day year.
Seth Shostak of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (Seti) in Mountain View, California, told the Guardian he was shocked to have learned of the discovery only now – the readings from Russian radio telescope Ratan-600, Shostak said, were taken a year ago.
Seti, a private organization, searches the skies for alien life and has been underwritten by US government divisions as diverse as Nasa and the Department of Energy. Operated by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ratan-600’s primary area of focus is monitoring the sun, though it has contributed to Seti’s work.
The news came to international attention on Saturday through Claudio Maccone of the University of Turin in Italy, who attended a talk by the scientists who recorded the signal on 15 May 2015. Maccone passed data from the presentation to the science and science-fiction writer Paul Gilster, who maintains a blog about interstellar exploration called Centauri Dreams.
Maccone sent the Guardian his proposed presentation for the International Academy of Astronautics 2016 meeting on the subject of the search for alien life, set for 27 September. He will call for the permanent monitoring of HD164595. “The power of the signal received is not unrealistic for type I civilizations,” he wrote.
The phrase “type I civilization” is a designation on the Kardashev scale, named for Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev developed in the 1960s and described in English in his 1985 paper On the Inevitability and the Possible Structures of Supercivilizations. A type I civilization would be similar to the current development of technology on earth.
“Could it be an ET?” asked Shostak rhetorically. “Of course, but [Ratan-600] didn’t have a receiver that has any spectral resolution.” The receiver on the Russian radio telescope is very wide, which aids it in its primary mission of monitoring solar activity but also means that, like a terrestrial radio receiving a news station, rock’n’roll station and country station at the same time, it is difficult to discern which band is broadcasting at which frequency. “They have a receiver that would swallow a big chunk of the radio dial at once,” Shostak said.
Because the receiver covers such a big sweep of the radio dial, it is hard to tell if the signal comes from intelligent life.
If it is being broadcast across a large chunk of the radio spectrum, the noise is probably coming from a quasar or another source of stellar “noise”; if it is over a narrower band but very strong, it is likelier to be the product of intelligence.
Gilster said he was curious about the possibility that the signal could be caused by “microlensing” – a quirk of gravity that occurs when massive objects like stars or quasars are aligned behind another heavenly body.
“My own thought is that this is very possibly a one-time signal, much like the famous WOW! signal some years back,” Gilster said. On 15 August 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman received a powerful radio signal from a group of stars called Chi Sagittarii; he circled the surprising spot on the readout and wrote “WOW!” The signal never returned.
“If it too doesn’t repeat,” said Gilster, “then we won’t know what it was, including the possibility of some kind of local signal whose source just hasn’t been figured out.”
Shostak said he wished he had been made aware of the signal earlier. “Why is it that we’re hearing about this now because one of the guys gave a talk in Moscow a year ago?” he asked. “Maccone’s explanation is that the Russians are ‘shy’. [But] it’s generally accepted procedure in the Seti community if you find a signal that you think is interesting, you call up people in another observatory and say: ‘Hey, here’s the position in the sky,’ and you see what happens.”
Gilster said his understanding was that the Russian team had spent the past year analyzing and confirming its data.
Shostak told the Guardian that Seti’s own radio telescope was scanning the coordinates in question in search of the promising signal as of Sunday night. That evening, though, everything was quiet.
The Russian radio telescope team and Maccone have been contacted for comment.
The search for radio signals from alien worlds is expanding to 20,000 star systems that were previously considered poor targets for intelligent extraterrestrial life, US researchers said Wednesday.
New scientific data has led the SETI Institute to believe systems orbiting red dwarfs—dim, long-lived stars that are on average billions of years older than our sun—are worth investigating.
“This may be one instance in which older is better,” said astronomer Seth Shostak of California-based SETI, a private, non-profit organization which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
“Older solar systems have had more time to produce intelligent species.”
The two-year project involves picking from a list of about 70,000 red dwarfs and scanning 20,000 of the nearest ones, along with the cosmic bodies that circle them.
To do this, scientists will use the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in northern California, a group of 42 antennas that can observe three stars simultaneously.
“We’ll scrutinize targeted systems over several frequency bands between 1 and 10 GHz,” said SETI scientist Gerry Harp.
“Roughly half of those bands will be at so-called ‘magic frequencies’—places on the radio dial that are directly related to basic mathematical constants,” he added.
“It’s reasonable to speculate that extraterrestrials trying to attract attention might generate signals at such special frequencies.”
For a long time, scientists ruled out searching around red dwarfs because habitable zones around the stars are small.
Any planets orbiting them would be so close that one side would be constantly facing the star, making one side of the planet very hot and the other quite cold and dark.
But more recently, scientists have learned that heat could be transported from the light side of the planet to the darker side, and that much of the surface could be amenable to life.
“In addition, exoplanet data have suggested that somewhere between one sixth and one half of red dwarf stars have planets in their habitable zones, a percentage comparable to, and possibly greater than, for Sun-like stars,” said the statement.
Experts have been hunting for alien intelligence for six decades, but have not found any evidence yet.
The SETI Institute has inaugurated a greatly expanded hunt for deliberately produced radio signals that would indicate the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Over the course of the next two years, it will scrutinize the vicinities of 20,000 so-called red dwarf stars.
“Red dwarfs – the dim bulbs of the cosmos – have received scant attention by SETI scientists in the past,” notes Institute engineer Jon Richards. “That’s because researchers made the seemingly reasonable assumption that other intelligent species would be on planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun.”
This conservative assessment was bolstered by the argument that few planets were likely to be found in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star, simply because that zone is far narrower than for brighter stars like the Sun. Additionally, any worlds that were in this zone would be orbiting so close to their suns that they would quickly become tidally locked – with one hemisphere perpetually facing the star. It was assumed that this would produce a planet that was intolerably hot on one side, and brutally cold on the other, ruling it out as an abode for life.
However, more recent research has indicated that, if these worlds have oceans and atmospheres, heat would be transported from the lit side to the dark, and a significant fraction of the planet would be habitable. In addition, exoplanet data have suggested that somewhere between one sixth and one half of red dwarf stars have planets in their habitable zones, a percentage comparable to, and possibly greater, than for Sun-like stars.
“Significantly, three-fourths of all stars are red dwarfs,” notes SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak. “That means that if you observe a finite set of them – say the nearest twenty thousand – then on average they will be at only half the distance of the nearest twenty thousand Sun-like stars.”
Closer stars mean that any signals would be stronger.
Also, red dwarfs burn for a period of time that’s greater than the current age of the universe: every red dwarf ever born is still shining today. They are, on average, billions of years older than stars than Sun-like stars.
“This may be one instance in which older is better,” Shostak says. “Older solar systems have had more time to produce intelligent species.”
The search is being conducted on the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, located in the Cascade Mountains of northern California. This grouping of 42 antennas can currently observe three stars simultaneously.
“We’ll scrutinize targeted systems over several frequency bands between 1 and 10 GHz,” says Institute scientist Gerry Harp. “Roughly half of those bands will be at so-called ‘magic frequencies’ – places on the radio dial that are directly related to basic mathematical constants. It’s reasonable to speculate that extraterrestrials trying to attract attention might generate signals at such special frequencies.”
The new red dwarf survey is planned to take two years. Targets are being chosen from a list of approximately 70,000 red dwarfs compiled by Boston University astronomer Andrew West. The search will also incorporate relevant new data as generated by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) project, which will examine nearby stars, including red dwarfs, for planets.
About SETI Institute
The SETI Institute is a multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative research organization committed to exploring, understanding, and explaining the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. It does so with expertise in fields ranging from astrophysics and planetary science to biology and social science, as well as computer science and signal detection. We have a passion not only for discovery, but also for sharing knowledge as scientific ambassadors to the public, the press, and government. The SETI Institute is a distinguished partner for government agencies, academic institutions, and corporations around the world.
SETI is the nonprofit organization in charge of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Ever since 1985, they have been combing the skies looking for ET and tying to anticipate all of the issues that we may encounter as a result of this endeavor. In their research, they look at the problems associated with finding alien life (from the difficulties that we will face because of the amazing distances that will likely separate Earth and alien worlds, to the steps that we must take in order to avoid interstellar conflict).
And SETI just released a free eBook that deals with some of this research.
The book discusses the problems, pitfalls, and advancements that we’ve made in the quest to communicate with extraterrestrials. This is an important issue. In a 2010 documentary, physicist Stephen Hawking warned that extraterrestrials may be more advanced than us. As such, if they visit Earth, they could exploit or exterminate us (consider the imperialist extermination of Native peoples around the globe).
As he notes, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” Thus, proper communication with ET is a must. The text is titled Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication, and it was edited by the SETI Director of Interstellar Message Composition, Douglas Vakoch. The aim of the text is to address some of the issues surrounding alien life and alien communication in order to prepare us “for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come.”
The text addresses the prerequisites for establishing interstellar communication, issues that may arise as a result of first contact, how we should covey and characterize our cultural values to an alien civilization, and a host of other issues.
Some of the book’s chapters include—The Evolution of Extraterrestrials: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Estimates of the Prevalence of Intelligence Beyond Earth; Contact Considerations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective; Speaking for Earth: Projecting Cultural Values Across Deep Space and Time; Learning To Read:Interstellar Message Decipherment from Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives; and Mirrors of Our Assumptions: Lessons from an Arthritic Neanderthal.
Since it is nearing the end of Summer in the Northern hemisphere, this is certainly a fantastic text to save for a rainy day. So go prepare yourself for alien contact with this book.
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