Aliens are like buses, you spend ages waiting for one and then 234 come along at once. Or at least, that is what two astronomers from the Laval University in Quebec are proposing. Ermanno Borra and his graduate student Eric Trottier have analyzed over 2.5 stars galaxies and stars for pulses of light emitted at regular intervals and discovered it in 234 stars similar in size to our Sun. The team trusts that alien civilizations are behind those signals.
The investigators looked at the Fourier Transform of the light spectrum. The FT is a mathematical tool that allows us to work out where the components of a signal come from. If the light is a milkshake, by using the Fourier Transform you get the recipe. The Fourier Transform analysis has found periodic modulated components which, according to the researchers, are caused by the super quick light pulses (less than a trillionth of a second) produced by Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI). In the paper, available from the Publications of theAstronomical Society of the Pacific, they remove every other explanation such as rotation of molecules, instrumental effects, peculiar chemistry, and rapid stellar pulsations.
“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 investigators wrote in the paper.
“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.”
These superfast pulses will have to be produced by extremely powerful lasers, like the one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Fascinatingly, in previous publications Borra has indicated that this area of astronomy is the least explored, which raises the question on why these aliens would all decide to communicate in such a complicated and energy consuming way.
The scientists admit that although they believe aliens are the most likely explanation, this is yet to be confirmed. The Stephen Hawking backed project Breakthrough Listen will conduct follow up observations of these 234 stars, but the team at UC Berkeley, where the project's science program is based, invite people to be skeptical.
“The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations,” the Breakthrough Listen team said in a statement.
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