An worldwide group of astronomers has detected an interesting radio signal spike, one that could possibly be of alien origin, from a star system located 95 light-years away.
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A team of scientists who investigate extra terrestrial signals from outer space may have found signs of life on a star 95 light-years away.
“The chance that this is truly a signal from extraterrestrials is not terribly promising”, he said on the institute’s website. But the possibility that this signal coming from the area around HD 164595 still remains, and it’s saying something that SETI doesn’t want to rule it out. That’s a billion times wider than the bandwidths traditionally used for SETI, and is 200 times wider than a television signal.
Decorated Italian SETI researcher and mathematician Claudio Maccone along with Russia’s Nikolai Bursov of the Special Astrophysical Observatory are the principal scientists working on the apparent discovery.
Few details have been released so far, but more information about the finding will be announced at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), which will be held in Guadalajara, Mexico during the last week of September.
An global team of researchers is now examining the radio signal, and star HD 164595, in the hopes of determining its origin. However, there could be other planets in this system that are still undiscovered. The signal appears to have come from a star, just like our own Sun, with at least one known planet in the constellation Hercules, 95 light years away. HD 164595 b, a known planet in this system is similar in size to Neptune and orbits its star in 40 days.
Shostak says it’s about 2.7 centimetres (1.06 inches) in wavelength and 11 GHz in frequency, which makes it an ultra high-frequency signal that’s not too different from a digital TV signal.
“The signal may be real”. But the power would be comparable to all the energy that humanity uses – including all our transportation, all our electronics, and all our power plants. Then the required power is 1020 watts, or 100 billion billion watts. The power requirement gets even steeper, he said. But if they were aiming a narrow beam signal directly at Earth, which requires far less energy, they could be a Type I civilization. However, in his blogpost Shostak noted that “we have not yet covered the full range of frequencies in which the signal could be located.A detection, of course, would immediately spur the SETI and radio astronomy communities to do more follow-up observations”.
“The signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target”, said Gilster. The Allen Telescope Array isn’t as big as the RATAN-600 Radio Telescope, so it may not be powerful enough to pick up what the Russian astronomers found.
However, there are plenty of dissenters who think there’s nothing to see here.
“It looks to me like a storm in a teacup at the moment, it could be absolutely anything”, said CSIRO astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith.
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The signal that the astronomical world is so concerned with now was first detected in May 2015 by Russians with aid of the the RATAN-600 radio telescope at a facility in the republic of Karachay-Cherkessia, not far from the Georgian border.
