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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 lgw on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:12AM

    by lgw (2836) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:12AM (#418793)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:32PM (#418946)

    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

      by lgw (2836) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:16PM (#419102)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:45PM (#419165)

        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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:37PM (#419200)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:08AM (#419278)
          Oh yes, scads of them. There is evidence for it in the CMB spectrum, in the form of subtle peaks, which cannot be produced by normal matter. Normal matter when subjected to the pressures of the early universe will oscillate, but dark matter will not, and this is reflected by the measurements of the CMB. Dark matter has also been used to predict the abundances of the various elements produced by primordial nucleosynthesis, i.e. just how much hydrogen, helium, and other elements were produced in the early universe before the first stars. It has also predicted the way structure formation occurs in the universe, that smaller structures such as protogalaxies form and then galaxies then galactic clusters.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:34AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:34AM (#419282)

            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

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @06:07AM (#419301)
              It's not unobservable stuff. You look far away enough you see the universe as it was in the past.