© Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
Sixty-four-meter radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia, which detected potential signals from Proxima Centauri last year
It's never aliens — until it is. Today news leaked in the British newspaper the
Guardian of a mysterious signal coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, a star too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye that is nonetheless a cosmic stone's throw away at just 4.2 light-years.
Found this autumn in archival data gathered last year, the signal appears to emanate from the direction of our neighboring star and cannot yet be dismissed as Earth-based interference, raising the very faint prospect that it is a transmission from some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) — a so-called "technosignature."
Now, speaking to
Scientific American, the scientists behind the discovery caution there is still much work to be done, but admit the interest is justified. "It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it," says Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley.
Most curiously, it occupies a very narrow band of the radio spectrum: 982 megahertz, specifically, which is a region typically bereft of transmissions from human-made satellites and spacecraft.
"We don't know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency" such as this one, Siemion says. Perhaps, he says, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves. But "for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological."
Comment: If the climate crazies took a look back every so often to see how far off course the "warnings" were, maybe they would hold an ounce or two of skepticism towards the stories that continue to roll out today, and going forward. But we're not holding our breath on this one.
All we can do is continue to point out what the more objective voices of science are saying, and what the results of observable changes and independent research are telling us: