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Radio News: That signal from space is probably not aliens

Aug 30, 2016 11:17 pm
Scientific American was quick to jump into the discussion last week about the sounds Russian scientists supposedly heard, saying the discovery of a possible radio signal from outer space is, "this week’s biggest non-story in science." Science journalist Paul Gilster wrote last week about a message he had received from some Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence researchers reporting a powerful three-second burst of radio waves from less than 100 light-years away, and claiming they could not rule out the possibility that the signal was artificial. In reality, in May of 2015, the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia detected the signal from about 94 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, claims that, "a radio blast sent out in all directions by a hypothetical alien civilization would take hundreds of times more power than that of all the sunlight bathing the Earth, based on how bright the signal appeared in the Russian telescope.... If it were instead a beam focused solely on the Earth, the signal would still require twice the electricity used by the United States in an entire year. Eric Korpela, an astronomer at the University of California in Berkeley said, "SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate.... Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.” But this radio signal everyone is talking about this week was only heard once and Korpela said the signal could have been, "due to flares from the target star, the burp of a supermassive black hole in a background galaxy, or even the chance magnification of ordinary, all-natural stellar radio emissions by a passing foreground star or a transient ripple of interstellar plasma."
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