SETI notices strange signal from star HD 164595

Concerted efforts to search the sky for alien transmissions have been going on since the 1980s, and according to the SETI Institute, scientists are now looking into a radio signal that could be coming from alien life.

The signal is coming from the HD164595 star system 94 light years away, which is known to contain a Neptune-sized planet. The planet isn’t thought to harbor life as we know it, but scientists have said other currently-undetected planets could also be orbiting HD164595.

According to Paul Gilster, an astronomer affiliated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and author of the Centauri Dreams website, the strong radio signal could be coming from a natural phenomenon, but scientists have yet to rule out the possibility it is coming from an intelligent society.

“No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study,” Glister wrote on his website.

The signal is quite strong, so strong that if it is coming from an alien civilization, they would be much more advanced than us. If they were targeting Earth specifically, it would require more than 1 trillion watts of energy. If they were sending the signal out in all directions, it would require much more energy.

The findings were made with a receiver that had a bandwidth of 1 GHz, a bandwidth 1 billion times broader than the bandwidths typically used for SETI, and is 200 times broader than a television signal. According to the SETI Institute, the signal was “weak,” but that might be due to the distance of HD 164595. It could have also been weak due to “dilution” of the signal by the very wide bandwidth of the receiver that was used.

“Just as a pot pie, incorporating lots of ingredients, can make guessing the individual foodstuffs more difficult, a wide-bandwidth receiver can dilute the strength of relatively strong narrow-band signals,” the SETI Institute said.

The signal was detected only once out of 39 observations of HD164595, so it’s possible the signal may never be detected again. Nevertheless, large radio telescope arrays are currently being trained on the system.

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Image credit: Pixabay

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