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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:11AM
This isn't really what I am looking for. Rather than prose, is there a list somewhere with links to the papers and data. Skimming through I see a dozen or so times predictions have matched with data. Is that it?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bootsy on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:50PM
It explains why Gold and Copper are not the silver/grey colo(u)r of most other metals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:16PM
What are you looking for? You want a nice list of occurrences? Every time I knock my pencil off of my desk, I don't go and write a paper on the confirmation of Newtonian gravity and make a notch in the "confirmation" log. What more do you want from General Relativity? It predicted bending of light around masses which has been observed many many times. Precision timing has allowed direct confirmation of the rate of atomic clocks. You need to correct for this if you are doing precision geodesy. That's done millions of times a day. You've got the LIGO confirmation. That's huge. These are properties that the theory predicted, then were found, not the other way around.
Maybe you're better off with a page like this [ucr.edu], but I'm still not sure where you're coming from. Are you one of those who throw their hands up and say "I don't believe in quantum mechanics" simply because it just doesn't "feel" right? Is relativity the be-all end-all of theories? No, not even Einstein thought that. But do you really don't think it is a very good theory and is not tested? It might not be computational to the QED-level, but people have been trying to shoot holes in it for 100 years and it deflects every shot. In fact, it is SO good in the realm where it works, just like quantum mechanics, that there is a whole field of physics and people have spent their professional career trying to find a unifying theory to combine the two because they are both such excellent theories by themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:46PM
I see where you are coming from, but still think it is disingenuous of the people who keep saying "look how many times the predictions of relativity were correct" without mentioning the times they clearly aren't. In fact, a falsification means much more than a confirmation.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:12AM
I see where you are coming from, but still think it is disingenuous of the people who keep saying "look how many times the predictions of relativity were correct" without mentioning the times they clearly aren't. In fact, a falsification means much more than a confirmation.
That's because there aren't any "times they clearly aren't" yet, nice as it would be for physics if we would find some. There are many areas of physics where relativity has nothing to say, of course, like any theory. Sure, dark energy may turn out to be something inconsistent with general relativity, that's possible, and there are certainly dark energy theories along those lines, but then there are plenty that aren't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:32PM
GR broke down almost right away in predicting the orbits of stars in galaxies. Just one level of complexity up from the solar system.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:16PM
No, it really didn't. Not even a little. Nor did Newtonian physics, which is a lot more relevant. Dark matter was instead the answer: to galactic rotation rates, to gravitational lensing where no visible matter existed (GR being right again), and to the distribution of matter in the early universe as observed via the CMBR.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:45PM
Anti-dark matter troll alert. Can't accept the fact that dark matter has been indirectly observed to the level that gravitational radiation was when PSR B1913+16 was discovered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:37PM
Dark matter may or may not be the right solution in the end, but it is an extremely flexible ad hoc solution. Has it lead to any successful predictions outside of the problems it was devised to solve (ie deviation from GR predictions)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:08AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:34AM
The "subtle peaks" in the CMB spectrum sounds ok, I'll check that... the rest sounds like it is unobservable stuff that happened billions of years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @06:07AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:22AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:34PM
Ive come to think those theories are hugely different. In one gravity is instantaneous, in the other it follows a universal speed limit. These are two totally different universes that hold totally different possibilities.