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Discovery of peculiar modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars
- M_Grey 10y agoMy bet? Stars are strange. What we don't understand about stellar evolution really can't be overstated. Even where examples of it exist, we only get snapshots of the process which takes a great deal of time, and those snapshots are often utterly obscured by dust.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoIf it is an ETI sending out laser signals, what are the odds that 234 of them would hit us?
- tuzemec 10y agoWe are in the spotlight of a weird alien reality show?
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoThat would explain this election year
- MrZongle2 10y agoMore like the last 20-25, I think.
- coldcode 10y agoIf the universe is a simulation, it might have a bug.
- slantedview 10y agoOut of 2.5 million analyzed mind you. Still seems surprising though.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoSure, but they're all approximately the same spectral type as our star; how many of those 2.5 million were also the same type?
- DougWebb 10y agoThat's the number we can detect. Either intelligent life is extraordinarily rare, and we're the only local example, or it's fairly common and we just haven't detected it yet. I'd be much more surprised if we only discovered a single intelligent neighbor than if we discover a few hundred of them.
- M_Grey 10y agoOr it's common, but it doesn't last once it starts developing the technology required to broadcast its presence, so we're all separated by time. We certainly don't appear likely to last very long, as a broadcasting species.
- ebcode 10y agoI want to know if our own star is also sending out these "peculiar periodic spectral modulations"??? If our own star is doing this as well, it could indicate that our solar system is a part of some type of "network", and these 234 stars would make excellent candidates in the search for intelligent life.
- cyphar 10y agoOur star does oscillate and we have studied its oscillations in great depth within asteroseismology (specifically helioseismology). But I'm overall doubtful of the conclusions of this paper, specifically the Fourier transforms they show don't appear special to me -- it looks like granulation background you get in effectively every star (though they do say they subtracted a "smoothed spectrum").
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ythl 10y agoAnytime a headline presents two alternatives - one supernatural/mindblowing, and one ordinary, it's almost always the ordinary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... "Are 234 aliens trying to contact us??"
- gjolund 10y agoET should always be the hypothesis of last resort. It is the modern equivalent of blaming the gods for a natural disaster.
- api 10y agoNo, it's not. While I agree that it should be a late-stage hypothesis for simple Ockham's Razor reasons, there is absolutely nothing irrational nor supernatural about ET. Everything we know about life and about the universe, including the prevalence of Earth-sized and possibly Earth-like planets around other stars, makes ET an inductively obvious and very likely reality. It's not confirmed yet, but it's a hypothesis that belongs in the same category as the Higgs Boson prior to the LHC: according to rest of what we know ETs should exist and we should expect to find evidence of this in some form someday. It could come in the form of microbes or fossils on Mars, Titan, or Europa, or it could come in the form of a signal or even a probe or a spacecraft from the stars. The latter is IMHO no less likely. We exist and we send signals and space probes and pretty soon spacecraft. While we don't yet send these things very far, if we continue to develop as we have been we probably will someday. If we are a product of natural processes and those same processes are happening elsewhere (naturalistic metaphysics plus Kepler data says yes) then other things capable of sending signals or craft should exist elsewhere. Due to the age distribution of stars, some of them may have been around longer and therefore have had longer to evolve. If anything the persistent absence of ET would suggest to me that modern science's fundamental understanding of reality may be incorrect. Either the theists are right, we're in a simulation (which is virtually identical to theism when you think about it), or something else profoundly strange is going on. I attribute the intense skepticism of ETs to the silliness of much of UFO mythology. It's important to realize that the Rael cult and the abduction myth and so forth are a cultural phenomenon that has zero bearing on science one way or the other. Culture will take scientific ideas and hypotheses and run with them, and that's fine, but it shouldn't distract from reality or provoke an irrational backlash. Do we stop looking into "weird" possibilities in quantum physics because there are new agers who say silly things about QM? No, and we shouldn't dismiss aliens either. If we do we are actually letting pseudoscience and non-science dictate (in the negative) where science is willing to go.
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- dimino 10y agoWhy aren't they including random chance into the possible explanations? I might not understand this correctly, but out of 2.5 million stars, the ~240 they found to match their expected pattern could just be the random hit rate of this pattern among stars, .0096%.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoRandom chance of what, though?
- lucideer 10y ago"Better reign in the headline writers", the article concludes. I guess the headline writer here didn't read the full text...
- pklausler 10y agos/reign/rein/, sigh.
- ChefDenominator 10y agoAnother science/tech philosophical breakdown. Stars are. Only human perception can be "weird".
- oldmanjay 10y agoAnd what useful conclusions can be drawn from that?
- ChefDenominator 10y agoThat depends on what an individual would perceive as being useful.
- oldmanjay 10y agoThe most charitable interpretation I can then offer is that it is masturbation. Nothing wrong with masturbation, of course, but it's rather unseemly to do it in public.
- thingexplainer 10y agoThe correct answer would have been to pick a reasonable assumption (before you ask, your own judgement determines what is reasonable) for what "useful" is, and to clarify that that was the assumption you were using. We don't have to question whether or not anything means anything in order to engage with every topic every time, but I appreciate the exercise.
- ChefDenominator 10y agoThis is a strawman trying to confuse my claim with nihilism.
- treve 10y agoThat works for a lot of stuff: > Stars are. Only human perception can be "red, and giant". We describe things using metaphors and concepts that make sense in our world. So what's your point?
- Jun8 10y agoThis (https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5986 https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5986) is his 2012 paper where the method used here is justified. Also gives a short summary of SETI efforts in the introduction. He discussed the energy requirements to send a signal of the type described so it can be detected at 1000ly, which seem reasonable.
- gh1 10y agoA much more balanced take on the subject is offered in the link at the bottom of the article https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf I am quoting from there: "The international SETI community has established a 0 to 10 scale for quantifying detections of phenomena that may indicate the existence of advanced life beyond the Earth called the "Rio Scale". The BSRC team assesses the Borra-Trottier result to currently be a 0 or 1 (None/Insignificant) on this scale. If the signal were to be confirmed with another independent telescope, its significance would rise, though an exhaustive analysis of other possible explanations, including instrumental phenomena, must be performed before supporting the hypothesis that artificially generated pulses are responsible for the claimed signal."
- Udo 10y agoThank you for that link. phys.org - as usual - barely mentions what the signal even is, and contains no information about the structure of those pulses (instead they chose to show one of the least relevant bar graphs I've ever seen twice, probably because it looks "signally"). So this is the actual paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/128/969/114201/meta;jsessionid=090356AEFE87C5CBA9816AAAEF31A53B.c1.iopscience.cld.iop.org http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/128/969/... I'm going to have to read that now, but if these pulses are as stupidly regular as hinted, there is probably nothing to see here.
- tgflynn 10y agoFrom the abstract: Signals having the same period were found in only 234 stars overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range. Why would they expect signals from 100's of different stars to have the same period ? Doesn't this suggest some sort of instrumental or analysis artifact ?
- empthought 10y agoWhy would we expect a subset of supernovae to have exactly the same peak luminosity no matter where they are and what stars they occur in? Instrument artifact, or previously-unknown outcome of the physical laws of the universe?
- lambdasquirrel 10y agoAre all the star systems blinking in much the same way? If so, that suggests a natural phenomenon. Or there is a vast interstellar empire with a fascination for sending out the same kind of pulsed signals. Which pretty much tips it towards natural phenomenon.
- sidcool 10y agoA similar strangeness was observed in a star which dimmed inexplicably. A Dyson sphere is suspected, aka a super advanced civilization
- ebcode 10y agoAny chance you can point to the research on that?
- photogrammetry 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852
- ebcode 10y agoThanks! I was imagining a star suddenly going dim and staying that way. This does not appear to be that.
- zamalek 10y ago> It may be a bit of a red flag when scientist's find the very thing they predicted they would find. This is how science actually works.
- kylek 10y ago"Settled science" is hard to overcome.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoYou know what they (physicists and astronomers) say...Its never Aliens.
- noetic_techy 10y agoDoes anyone understand the chart enough in the original paper to correlate the plate ID's with specific named stars? I'm curing to know the distance some of these stars are to us.
- cyphar 10y agoHere's a link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031 https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031 Ignoring the quite unconventional formatting (single column, figures at the end with the references), I'm not entirely convinced by the plots at the end of the paper. Specifically, their examples of "odd" Fourier transforms look quite normal. Specifically, the noise level (how it looks like a power function) is related to the "granulation background" of the star and is predicted by asteroseismic stellar models (the equations are ugly but they do exist). Normally you remove them from your transforms before you do anything with them. To be fair, they did say they "subtracted a smooth spectrum" but the noise level doesn't look flat enough to me. Also, their Fourier transforms are in super funky units -- in asteroseismology you generally want to use PSFs (Power Spectral Frequency, where the y axis is P/Hz).