Mysterious signals 1000 light years away?

Maybe it's being broadcast from a probe traveling through space. Kind of like a Voyager with a fire siren.

A Dyson sphere would be large enough to produce the 37hz drift, wouldn't it? Also, it does seem 'fishy' that we pick it up before it drifts, unless they know we're here and know how to detect when we're looking at them.


Maybe a beacon??

[edit on 1-9-2004 by everlastingnoitall]

electric: yeah, we're thinking of the same guy...but, do you (or does anyone else) know where in the sky the signal the guy was "detecting" was coming from, like near which constellations or what not?

Seth Shostak from SETI is supposed to be discussing this in the first hour tonight on Art Bell.

The fact that the signal is not constant, and is apparent of a 'fast moving planet' could possibly be explained by a Dyson sphere. Maybe the dyson sphere is spinning at a weird velocity, and/or the transmitter is situated accordingly to explain the phenomenon.

Originally posted by sisonek
electric: yeah, we're thinking of the same guy...but, do you (or does anyone else) know where in the sky the signal the guy was "detecting" was coming from, like near which constellations or what not?

I think this is the or iginal thread.

Sounds like he was using standard recieving equipment, listening to the hydrogen line on a scanner. I have an audio representation of the signal he posted, it does sound like a digital stream of some sort.

Noone is meant to broadcast on the hydrogen line, but you just don't know.

Here's one other source that's reporting on it. Nothing new:

www.dailyrecord.co.uk...=14594417%26method=full%26siteid=89488%26headline=space%2dcall%2dfrom%2det-name_page.html

I haven't seen any other news sources pick up on this story, though it could just be getting buried with all the other news going on. The New Scientist article is starting to travel around the net, though.

The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is �fishy�, he says. �If [the aliens] are so smart, they�ll adjust their signal for their planet�s motion.�

That makes some sense but I doubt we were smart enough to do the same thing when we first started transmitting signals of our own. If this does somehow turn out to be alien in origin it could be that we are receiving the first signals from them at a point when they were at an early stage of techological development.

Or it could just be a weird natural signal as others pointed out. I don't like to get my hopes up too soon so I will default to that line of thinking until more is known.

electricthanks -- it looks like whatever radio antenna he was using wasn't able to be "pointed" in any specific location, so it's hard to say where in the sky he thought the signal was coming from...too bad....

Discovery Channel's Daily Panet were talking about this tonight. They basically said it appears to be a legit signal from ET's. They also said before they come out and actually say this, the researchers want to run some more tests to be sure.
Interesting, I guess we wait and see.....

Originally posted by Sparro
Discovery Channel's Daily Panet were talking about this tonight. They basically said it appears to be a legit signal from ET's.

Really! Wow, hmmm...interesting.

I found the signal in the list of promising candidates on the Seti@Home page. It gives some more info on it, like the approximate coordinates, who found it & other technical details. Still no official announcement on their site:

setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu...

Seth Shostak from SETI totally shot this report down.He said a reporter from New scientist had totally misinterpreted things and made a mountain out of a molehill.

Yeah...

I listened to the interview as well. Though he stated that he thought the report was just an example of a reporter overblowing something....

...he also did not refute the data, and, as I understand it, is not a current, active member of the SETI staff (though I could be wrong). That is to say... he sounded like an outsider shooting down a report he had no first hand knowledge of. He even admitted to being surprised by the data reporters confronted him with,

Look, I have nothing against him... but the interview came across as one of a former member of a group being asked to comment on its current discoveries. Not knowing what those were... he denied them and attributed them to journalistic errors.


I don't think that he is covering up for something... however... just because he blew this story off doesn't mean that there is nothing there..

BTW, I think that Drudge was the person who added the "1000 light years" bit for the sake of drama...

I want to say that this is GREAT news! It is a common frequency, but they say that �If [the aliens] are so smart, they�ll adjust their signal for their planet�s motion". I think that is wrong since chances are theat they are just like us and sending out a general signal and I would think that they do not know anyone else exist that they wouldn't be sending it directly to us so the amplitude should fade in and out showing the single is moving away in a particular orbit or it should stay semi steady from a life made probe!

If it is ET what do you think will happen in the contacting them sernario? personaly i think it would be a bad idea to just let ET know we are here without knowing anything about them what if they are like us & like taking out easy targets when it comes to knew land im thinking Aztecs v conqisterdors.
Also we probably could never meet them personaly because we would just kill each other with are germs accidently

i think that artical has been pulled its gone all that there is a link to it but no content herm strange donte you think

Originally posted by electric
the use of the hydrogen line is just convenient for SETI, not for ETI.

I had thought so when i heard thats what they scan. A cloud of hydrogen would transmit this signal too. There is nothing 'special' about transmitting on that line. If anything, wouldn't an extrasolar civilization not be broadcasting on a line that is transmitted by the most common element in the universe?

I see no valid reason to assume ETI would know to transmit intelligence on the hydrogen line. Unless they knew somehow that SETI was listening on that frequency.

everlasting england:
contacting them sernario?

There really isn't any sort of contact scenario. The message (natural or artificial) took 1,000 years (in all likelyhood anyways) to get here, and anything sent from us would also take a thousand years. If an actual ET message is received, we'll probably spend several years trying to work out what to broadcast to them.

Also, did I miss something, this signal is from february of 2003 no? So it was recieved then, and then took a while to get processed, how long has the signal been known about?

the article:
�If [the aliens] are so smart, they�ll adjust their signal for their planet�s motion.�

Wouldn't not correcting for this infact be smarter? Anyone recieving it will be able to get information about the planets rotation rate, and would be able to state that it is infact a planet. The rotation rate might give information about the distance from its home star too no?

every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting.

Can't be real then. Its unthinkable that these aliens are monitoring whats happening in the observatory, and then waiting for them to'lock on', and then altering their signal. I mean, they could be doing it, and the transmiter could be somewhere very nearby, but why would they do that? Are these extraterrestrial practical jokers? If we communicate with the aliens, and ask then what their name is, are they gonna say 'dis is fraaaank rizo'?

[edit on 2-9-2004 by Nygdan]

When this type of information comes up the worlds leaders will be all over it behind the scenes. The big gipper told us all it would take an outside enemy to our planet as a whole to unite the world and bring about peace. Could this be another example of life imitating art and science fiction

The following link will bring you to the CNN article. I find this interesting seeing as CNN is usually quite conservative in article related to this topic. The article basically re-caps what we've all been talking about on this board.

The fact that this is on CNN gets me excited though!!!



www.cnn.com...