3 ms·

A 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.berkel

by gh1 10y ago

A 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 ago
Thank 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 ago
  From 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 ago
    Why 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?
    - tgflynn 10y ago
      Yes some natural phenomenon also seems possible. What I'm really questioning is their ETI hypothesis. How do they explain that 100's of different civilizations would all choose the same modulation period ?
    - cyphar 10y ago
      The difference is that asteroseismology (which comes from hydrodynamics) predicts that the oscillation frequencies of stars are determined by several factors intrinsic to the star. We therefore don't expect many different kinds of stars to have similar oscillation frequencies (though the oscillations themselves may have similarities such as the scaling relation for solar-like oscillators). I don't know much about the actual physics behind supernovae but I'm fairly sure that the maths makes the power predictions that we observe.

by gh1 10y ago

Udo 10y ago

Thank 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 ago
From 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 ago
  Why 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?
  - tgflynn 10y ago
    Yes some natural phenomenon also seems possible. What I'm really questioning is their ETI hypothesis. How do they explain that 100's of different civilizations would all choose the same modulation period ?
  - cyphar 10y ago
    The difference is that asteroseismology (which comes from hydrodynamics) predicts that the oscillation frequencies of stars are determined by several factors intrinsic to the star. We therefore don't expect many different kinds of stars to have similar oscillation frequencies (though the oscillations themselves may have similarities such as the scaling relation for solar-like oscillators). I don't know much about the actual physics behind supernovae but I'm fairly sure that the maths makes the power predictions that we observe.