Have We Detected an Alien Signal? It is Highly Doubtful

Astrogeology, Asteroids, Robots, Space Flight & Extraterrestrial Matters

Date posted: 09/03/16

Lee Billings opines that a blip of energy picked up by a Russian radio telescope held secret since 2015 might have been nothing more than a satellite passing overhead, or even a software glitch. Based on news reports from many prominent media outlets that should know better, the biggest non-story in science this week is the discovery of a possible radio signal from talkative aliens elsewhere in the Milky Way. Billings emphasizes that, alas, anyone hoping for this to be the moment of First Contact with another galactic civilization is very likely to be disappointed. It all started innocently enough, with a carefully worded blog post the past few days from the respected science journalist Paul Gilster. Gilster wrote about a message he had received from some SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers who reported a curiously powerful 3-second burst of radio waves from a star less than 100 light-years away. The researchers, led by Nikolai Bursov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, could not rule out the possibility that the signal was artificial, and were intrigued enough that they called for permanent monitoring of the star. The Gilster post ignited a firestorm of sensationalistic and credulous news coverage that is still blazing, burning through newspapers and websites to astound most everyone who encounters it. Soon, Billings predicts, it will burn out, just as these sorts of stories (almost) always do. Here is what happened ... in May of 2015, the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia detected the signal from the direction of HD 164595, a star about 94 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. This is a star very much like our Sun albeit slightly older, with an estimated age of 6.3 billion years. It also harbors at least one known planet, an uninhabitable Neptune-sized world, though of course others more habitable could exist in the system.