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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the take-me-to-your-leader dept.

Phys.org is reporting on a paper which details some interesting phenomena which could be evidence of advanced civilizations.

From the Phys.org article:

We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.

That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.

[...] What we're talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" was just published at arXiv.org. ArXiv.org is a pre-print website, so the paper itself hasn't been peer reviewed yet. But it is generating interest.

The two astronomers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. Of all those stars, they found 234 stars that are producing a puzzling signal. That's only a tiny percentage. And, they say, these signals "have exactly the shape of an ETI signal" that was predicted in a previous study by Borra.

Prediction is a key part of the scientific method. If you develop a theory, your theory looks better and better the more you can use it to correctly predict some future events based on it. Look how many times Einstein's predictions based on Relativity have been proven correct.

The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier's study aren't random. They're "overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range" according to the abstract. That's significant because this is a small range centred around the spectrum of our own Sun. And our own Sun is the only one we know of that has an intelligent species living near it. If ours does, maybe others do too?

The authors acknowledge five potential causes of their findings: instrumental and data reduction effects, rotational transitions in molecules, the Fourier transform of spectral lines, rapid pulsations, and finally the ETI signal predicted by Borra (2012). They dismiss molecules or pulsations as causes, and they deem it highly unlikely that the signals are caused by the Fourier analysis itself. This leaves two possible sources for the detected signals. Either they're a result of the Sloan instrument itself and the data reduction, or they are in fact a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligences.

Are these signals just evidence of some, as yet undiscovered, property of stars, or are these "transmissions" the alien equivalent of an episode of "The Bachelor"?

2012 paper predicting the signals reported on by Borra, et. al.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:11AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:11AM (#418404) Homepage
    The 2016 paper came over as being just as naive, it's painful to read.

    The 2012 paper also has the great line "Consequently, a good way to let others know of their existence is to generate a signal that is so unusual that it can only be artificial (Tarter 2001)." Which basically disproves the 2016 paper, as apparently this signal's pretty common. (It contains only a dozen of so bits of entropy.)

    What did you make of the "10^4" bit uder figure 5 in 2016? Sounds like "what we claim isn't visible in the data, so we added 10000 lots of what we want to see in the data in order to make it visible" to me.

    My conclusion: Loon. Or at least someone so entrenched in milking his own confirmation bias that he can be safely ignored.
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:21AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:21AM (#418406) Homepage
    I also love his inability to simplify sin (2 pi nu tau / 2)
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