Posted on 10/15/2016 7:33:11 AM PDT by MtnClimber
It’s a bold claim. Two astronomers think they have spotted messages from not just one extraterrestrial civilisation, but 234 of them. The news has sparked a lively debate in the field as other astronomers think the claim is premature and are working fast to get to the bottom of the signals.
In 2012, Ermanno Borra at Laval University in Quebec suggested that an extraterrestrial civilisation might use a laser as a means of interstellar communication. If the little green men simply flashed a laser toward the Earth like a strobe light, we would see periodic bursts of light hidden in the spectrum of their host star. They would be incredibly faint and rapid, but a mathematical analysis could uncover them.
“The kind of energy needed to generate this signal is not crazy,” says Borra. In fact, Borra showed that technology we have on Earth today – specifically the Helios laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – could generate that kind of signal, should we want to reveal ourselves to the cosmos.
With this in mind, Borra’s graduate student Eric Trottier combed through 2.5 million stars recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in search of such a signal. He found it, down to the exact shape, in 234 stars.
The overwhelming majority of those stars are in the same spectral class as the sun, which Borra says supports his hypothesis that this signature must be the result of extraterrestrial intelligent life. And with the data in hand, he thinks that 234 distinct civilisations are beaming pulses of the same periodicity (roughly 1.65 picoseconds) toward the Earth.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Why no message content?
Wild speculation, unworthy of a scientist.
234 other separate and individual intelligently inhabited planets are all beaming contact messages towards earth in unison?
I am sure they are friendly and only want to share souffle recipes.
Agreed—total BS.
They are here already—no need for long distance tap-dancing. :-)
Feeble Earthlings!
Pay no attention to this story!
Return to your work!
That is all.
What a difficult choice.
Little green men or errors in calibration or data analysis. So headline runs with little green men.
Sure, lets announce to the big bad unknown universe we’re so backward and unevolved that we can only send out radio signals. Woo hoo, here were are. No more advanced than ants. Come give us a hug.
Early voting from beyond our solar system, all favoring Hillary.
They all just happen to use the exact same frequency? They did not say how far apart these stars are but their ET theory only works if all these 234 stars are inhabited by the same extended civilization that uses the exact same frequency for their communications.
Just the Culture Orbitals advertising their latest programs and other entertainments, hoping Urth people will hop aboard one of the passing General Service Vehicles (GSV): Wisdom Like Silence and Limivorous (each around 150 km) are due to pass within a few lights and could displaces any size crowd that wants to join in thew fun (thousands acceptable, millions still better).
Other astronomers think that Borra’s intuition might have run away with him.
“They don’t consider every natural possibility and jump prematurely to the supernatural – so to speak – conclusion,” says Peter Plavchan at Missouri State University in Springfield. “I think it’s way too premature to do that.”
Roughly 200 stars out of millions studied, and the odds of intelligent life sending something we’d recognize when we were looking is near zero or we live in a Star Trek universe that has to be manufactured to create such simultaneity - I say the likely issue is human error.
It’s a homing signal
They are just beacons warning others that the worlds at these stars have been sterilized and won’t be worth settling for several million years...
Howard and Raj confess to Sheldon that the positive results that he received while using the equipment was really static from an electric can opener they kept turning on and off.
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