A Signal from Proxima Centauri?

[Jayjay]

It seems an odd way to communicate. Except perhaps mathematics, It may not be possible to communcate with a truly alien species.

I agree, odd. If the object was to announce our presence as an intelligent species, why send a coded message rather than just a sequence of one to ten bits? This signal was a string of 1679 bits that requires decoding to determine it means anything. It has to assume that who/what ever received it understood that it was an image, what a raster scan is, that it was 73 scan lines of 23 characters each, plus there was a hell of a lot of information that would have to be decoded if they did figure out it was a raster scan image.

As an example of how difficult this would be to understand, the string of bits was shown to several scholars not associated with the project and none of them could make any sense of it... and they were humans.

But then I guess it doesn't really matter since it won't be able to be received by any possible intelligence for another 25,000 years as it was directed at the star cluster M13. However it was a clever way for SETI to solicit donations, as donors were probably the real target.

25,000 years from now there are going to be some perplexed scientists in M13 cluster dismissing this message as a prank, because it's obvious that any intelligent species that wanted to communicate would obviously use crop circles and monoliths.

 

[barbos]

What the article says is this:

“In five of the 30-minute observations over about three hours we see this thing come back,”

So they had at least three hours of observations during which nodding away made the signal go away and coming back it returned. In three hours a star will cover a lot of sky.

There are Russian TV satellites which use highly elliptical orbits where satellites fly away from Earth and stay there for a while. Of course they are in northern part of the sky but who knows who have what in southern hemisphere.
Do they have exact time?
If they do you can use stellarrium to see if there were any satellites near that star.


here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit

 

[DBT]

What the article says is this:

“In five of the 30-minute observations over about three hours we see this thing come back,”

So they had at least three hours of observations during which nodding away made the signal go away and coming back it returned. In three hours a star will cover a lot of sky.

Yes, the odds are stacked heavily against an alien transmission, but I don't think that it can be completely dismissed yet.

 

[barbos]

Also, if this signal persisted for hours, why have not they contacted other telescopes for confirmation?
I would understand if it was few seconds blip but hours, plenty of time to make other telescopes stop whatever they were doing and turn dish to the Proxima.
In fact. I would be surprised if they have not planned such a thing.

 

[DBT]

Also, if this signal persisted for hours, why have not they contacted other telescopes for confirmation?
I would understand if it was few seconds blip but hours, plenty of time to make other telescopes stop whatever they were doing and turn dish to the Proxima.
In fact. I would be surprised if they have not planned such a thing.

To state the obvious, the reports are patchy on details. Just copies of a brief interview given by the researcher. Very little detail. Hopefully when the paper is published it sheds more light on the matter.

I don't know why there wouldn't be multiple telescopes at work to verify the signal after the discovery.

 

[barbos]

Also, if this signal persisted for hours, why have not they contacted other telescopes for confirmation?
I would understand if it was few seconds blip but hours, plenty of time to make other telescopes stop whatever they were doing and turn dish to the Proxima.
In fact. I would be surprised if they have not planned such a thing.

To state the obvious, the reports are patchy on details. Just copies of a brief interview given by the researcher. Very little detail. Hopefully when the paper is published it sheds more light on the matter.

I don't know why there wouldn't be multiple telescopes at work to verify the signal after the discovery.

Cynic in me thinks the reason is that they want occasional false signal. With multiple telescopes that would be very hard to achieve

 

[Shadowy Man]

Also, if this signal persisted for hours, why have not they contacted other telescopes for confirmation?
I would understand if it was few seconds blip but hours, plenty of time to make other telescopes stop whatever they were doing and turn dish to the Proxima.
In fact. I would be surprised if they have not planned such a thing.

To state the obvious, the reports are patchy on details. Just copies of a brief interview given by the researcher. Very little detail. Hopefully when the paper is published it sheds more light on the matter.

I don't know why there wouldn't be multiple telescopes at work to verify the signal after the discovery.

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Apparently there is ''still much work to be done.''

Well yeah... they haven't even published a paper yet. It almost certainly isn't aliens. But it is peculiar due to the signal frequency, the concentration of the signal, and the duration, though it hasn't been heard from since. It is likely terrestrial, and pretty much a lot of work needs to be done to prove it wasn't.

 

[DBT]

Also, if this signal persisted for hours, why have not they contacted other telescopes for confirmation?
I would understand if it was few seconds blip but hours, plenty of time to make other telescopes stop whatever they were doing and turn dish to the Proxima.
In fact. I would be surprised if they have not planned such a thing.

To state the obvious, the reports are patchy on details. Just copies of a brief interview given by the researcher. Very little detail. Hopefully when the paper is published it sheds more light on the matter.

I don't know why there wouldn't be multiple telescopes at work to verify the signal after the discovery.

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

Sure, but that shouldn't stop other researchers from pointing their telescopes at proxima century to verify the signal.

 

[barbos]

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

Sure, but that shouldn't stop other researchers from pointing their telescopes at proxima century to verify the signal.

Too late for that, aliens finding aliens lost their funding and turned their transmitter off 4.2 years ago

 

[Shadowy Man]

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

Sure, but that shouldn't stop other researchers from pointing their telescopes at proxima century to verify the signal.

The signal didn’t even persist through all of the observations taken at the time. Additionally, the article says;

“ So far, follow-up observations using Parkes have failed to turn up the signal again, with a repeat observation being a necessity to confirm that BLC1 is a genuine technosignature.”

 

[barbos]

Also, if this signal persisted for hours, why have not they contacted other telescopes for confirmation?
I would understand if it was few seconds blip but hours, plenty of time to make other telescopes stop whatever they were doing and turn dish to the Proxima.
In fact. I would be surprised if they have not planned such a thing.

To state the obvious, the reports are patchy on details. Just copies of a brief interview given by the researcher. Very little detail. Hopefully when the paper is published it sheds more light on the matter.

I don't know why there wouldn't be multiple telescopes at work to verify the signal after the discovery.

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

Yeah. They would have to explain why such a trivial search was not done in real time.
And what are their algorithms anyway that require offline computations?

 

[DBT]

So I guess it may just be another version of the 'WOW' signal.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

Yeah. They would have to explain why such a trivial search was not done in real time.
And what are their algorithms anyway that require offline computations?

Why do you think the search for this signal would have been “trivial”? It’s not what the original observations were intended to look for and the article doesn’t mention the full parameters of the observations. Like how much bandpass to what sensitivity etc.

 

[barbos]

The article said the signal was found when the data were looked at later. It wasn’t found in real time but in “archival” search.

Yeah. They would have to explain why such a trivial search was not done in real time.
And what are their algorithms anyway that require offline computations?

Why do you think the search for this signal would have been “trivial”? It’s not what the original observations were intended to look for and the article doesn’t mention the full parameters of the observations. Like how much bandpass to what sensitivity etc.

You can look at all bandpasses and sensitivities in real time just fine.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Why do you think the search for this signal would have been “trivial”? It’s not what the original observations were intended to look for and the article doesn’t mention the full parameters of the observations. Like how much bandpass to what sensitivity etc.

You can look at all bandpasses and sensitivities in real time just fine.

Even granting this were true for these specific observations on this specific telescope, that’s not what the original observations were looking for.

 

[barbos]

Why do you think the search for this signal would have been “trivial”? It’s not what the original observations were intended to look for and the article doesn’t mention the full parameters of the observations. Like how much bandpass to what sensitivity etc.

You can look at all bandpasses and sensitivities in real time just fine.

Even granting this were true for these specific observations on this specific telescope, that’s not what the original observations were looking for.

what they were looking for? I thought they were looking for aliens.
I mean it does not cost anything to have real time trigger for something interesting is that they did not care at all.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Even granting this were true for these specific observations on this specific telescope, that’s not what the original observations were looking for.

what they were looking for? I thought they were looking for aliens.

The article says:

A team had been using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to study Proxima Centauri for signs of flares coming from the red dwarf star, in part to understand how such flares might affect Proxima’s planets.

So, the original study was on stellar flares, and the archival data were searched for "technosignatures".

It has been my experience that science-quality data do not appear in real time at observatories. Much data reduction and calibration is usually needed to get to the actual results.

 

[barbos]

The article says:

A team had been using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to study Proxima Centauri for signs of flares coming from the red dwarf star, in part to understand how such flares might affect Proxima’s planets.

So, the original study was on stellar flares, and the archival data were searched for "technosignatures".

It has been my experience that science-quality data do not appear in real time at observatories. Much data reduction and calibration is usually needed to get to the actual results.

Dish Radio-telescope is essentially a single channel radio, you can do 99% of the stuff in real time.
The rest is data interpretation, not reduction.

 

[DBT]

Even granting this were true for these specific observations on this specific telescope, that’s not what the original observations were looking for.

what they were looking for? I thought they were looking for aliens.
I mean it does not cost anything to have real time trigger for something interesting is that they did not care at all.

The signal discovery appears incidental to red dwarf flare activity.