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Astronomers have heard hugely unusual messages from deep in space that they think are coming from aliens.
Astronomers Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Quebec shared that 234 of the 2.5 million stars observed during a digital sky survey were producing puzzling signals.
“We consider the possibility, predicted in a previous published paper, that the signals are caused by light pulses generated by Extraterrestrial Intelligence to makes us aware of their existence,” they wrote on arXiv.org. “We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis. 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 234 stars in the study emitting strobe-like pulsations of light are “overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range,” according to the report, which is significant because it is a small range around the spectrum of our Sun.
The paper has been accepted for publication in the journal “Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,” according to the Independent. Breakthrough Listen, a program of scientific and technological exploration at the University of California Berkeley funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking, released a statement saying it would conduct follow-up observations.
But, Breakthrough warns, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations.”
Agencies/Canadajournal
Real Time Clock for an interstellar network?
They ought first try assuming the signalling involves a physical process that we haven’t observed locally in our solar system and nor – until very recently – anywhere else. Is this really a great surprise? We’ve not long been in a technological position to observe at sufficient resolution and/or to crunch through vast amounts of data in a reasonable amount of time.
Surely the fact the signature is identical across all of the anomalous stars strongly suggests a natural event?