Exoplanet with Highest Habitability Rating Had Seti Signal Two Years Before It's Discovery

What do the purple blocks at the bottom of those pictures represent?

They said that this newly discovered earth like planet is older than earth,maybe that`s where we came from.

I did not know that SETI could catch...light. As far as I know, SETI listen, it does not watch.

So I made some research:
Dr. Ragbir Bhatal is known for his work in OSETI (Optical Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence ), not as a member of the original SETI.
en.wikipedia.org...

www.oseti.net...

www.princeton.edu...

So that answer it for me, I did not know there were others declensions of the SETI project.

There's already a thread about it on ATS by the way :
www.abovetopsecret.com...

About the signal, it seems that Dr Ragbir Bhatal thinks it was most likely caused by wayward cosmic rays.

“We were doing the normal run on our 0.4 meter (16 in.) Telescope in December 2008 and found this spike on our computer screen,” said astrophysicist Ragbir Bhathal, Director of the Australian Optical SETI Project at the University of Western Sydney Campbelltown. “It was quite exciting to see this very sharp signal and I wrote on the print-out “Is it E.T.?” But alas, No. Although Bhathal said there was no fault with the instruments; six months of trying to relocate the signal turned up nothing. “We have now dismissed it as spurious,” said Bhathal, who notes that instead of an intelligent signal from E.T., the spike was most likely caused by wayward cosmic rays.

www.forbes.com... ucedorminey/2012/07/18/aliens-with-lasers-seti-bets-on-nano-second-flashes-from-e-t/

Nice find anyway OP, thanks a lot! Who knows? :-)

reply to post by blindIo

About the signal, it seems that Dr Ragbir Bhatal thinks it was most likely caused by wayward cosmic rays.

The signal Bhatal detected also did not come from Gleise 581. Not from anywhere near the Gliese system. It came from 47 Tucanae, about half way across the sky from Gliese.

Gliese RA 15 19 26.82 Dec -07 43 20.2
Tucanae RA 00 24 .0567 Dec -72 04 52.6

In December 2008 a sharp laser look alike signal emanating from 47 Tucanae was detected. However, further searches in the same region have failed to detect the signal again.

www.lpi.usra.edu...

reply to post by Lulzaroonie


The intended star system which is 25,000 LY away is not the one we're discussing ITT, the system with the Gleise planets in is 20 LY away.

I'm speculating with no evidence at all that due to some cosmic event that we have no idea about, the message somehow reached Gleise too/instead.

Longshot I know, but I'm an optimist.

reply to post by Just Chris


I assume that's down to the political bickering I was talking about earlier.
"should we contact them directly?"
"no, remember the last time we did that to a civilisaition"
"well shall we return the message?"
"well no, too definitive... how about a crop circle?"

reply to post by Dispo



According to the article I cited in the original post, SETI almost immediately sent a message to Gleise. That's interesting because some posters cited recent claims that the signal didn't come from Gleise. Then, why did SETI send a signal to Gleise? Why did scientists turn their attention to this solar system and discover the planets only four months after receiving the light signal? Why did the scientist who found the signal change his story between the forbes and daily mall article?

reply to post by Tardacus


In our message, it's intended to be a parabolic mirror, the means of communication.

In the reply, it's believed to represent a crop circle.

reply to post by atopsecret

That's interesting because some posters cited recent claims that the signal didn't come from Gleise.

Recent claims? The guy who detected the signal says where it came from; 47 Tucanae.

Active SETI sent two transmissions to Gliese 581. The first in October of 2008 and the second in August or 2009. The signal (which was not from Gleise) was detected in December of 2008, after the first transmission from SETI.

Active SETI chose Gleise 581c because is was the first "super Earth" found within the habitable zone of its star.
www.eso.org...

Originally posted by watchitburn
reply to post by atopsecret

 

I don't know about anybody else, but I think we have found the first location outside of our solar system that we should visit.

How long would it take us to travel 20LY with today's tech?

edit on 10-1-2013 by watchitburn because: stupid autocorrect.

An apollo Saturn 5 after full burn would take half a million years.

Nobody is going anywhere until we find a way of travelling between two points in space at an effective speed greater than the speed of light. Not only that we need to have inertial dampeners if it involves acceleration in a reasonable time (ie round trip in 2 decades) otherwise the astronauts would be crushed to a pulp and that assumes "warp 1" !

To visit anywhere :

1. Some kind of wormhole, warping of space, or subspace travel (the trekkies are correct here)
2. Some kind of artificial gravity/inertial dampening to protect the travellers from acceleration....unless all travel was done by instantaneously linking two points is space near suns (very brave !)
3. Some kind of protection of the craft (shields) due to cosmic rays, micro meteorites etc whilst doing the necessary sub light travel.

reply to post by atopsecret


I knew there was a reason "THEY" were talking about the other planet they just found like a couple hundred light years away, being an Earth "twin".......

Look over here.....

POOF, aliens found right in our back yard!!

Originally posted by demonhauntedworld
reply to post by Dispo

 

Nice idea but the math doesn't work.
A signal from earth at the speed of light would take 20yrs to to travel 20 light years.
Then whatever they send back would take 20 years to get hear. Add time for political bickering.
At the minimum their return message would not arrive until 2014. That is probably a low estimate as wikipedia estimates gilese 581 to be 22 light years from earth. By that estimate it would take a return signal until 2018 to reach Earth, assuming it was replied to immediately.
... unless you assume they can somehow exceed light speed.

Perhaps they can!

I think the most interesting thing is lets say there is life on that planet and the other one in that solor system.


They actually have planetary neighbors. Pretty cool

reply to post by Dispo


What I've always found funniest about "the reply" picture is how in our picture we depict ourselves with big bodies and a teeny little pixel for a head. They depict themselves as HUGE heads and a tiny little body lol Let's say for a second that reply was the real deal. They were probably like "look at this primitive little pictogram from this small headed species. Let us send them a reply they can understand" LOL I just love this kinda thread.

I think we will eventually find it to be 'the norm' for some planets with life on to maybe have 2 or 3 other planets in the same solar system with life. Imagine that if there was a completely different intelligent species living on mars

Quote from Daily Mall article

Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g.

The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night that scientists had discovered another planet in the system: Gliese 581g - the most Earth-like planet ever found.

Dr Bhathal's discovery had come just months before astronomers announced that they had found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star 20 light years away. This planet was called Gliese 581e.

reply to post by atopsecret

Yes. And the Daily Mail got it wrong. Big surprise.

Here is the original article which the Daily Mail butchered. Please note that it does not say that the signal came from Gliese 581.
www.theaustralian.com.au...

The signal was detected from the direction of 47 Tucanae, not Gliese 581.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Idonthaveabeard
I think we will eventually find it to be 'the norm' for some planets with life on to maybe have 2 or 3 other planets in the same solar system with life. Imagine that if there was a completely different intelligent species living on mars

Sadly, the first item of business for the Earthlings would be to make war on those evil Martians, you know...
hit 'em before they hit us! Human paranoia would prevail!

EDIT: love the thread though.

Wonder what the odds really are of intelligent life developing on Gliese 581? Do the laws of evolution unalterably predestine development of intelligent life given similar starting conditions? There may be some randomness involved that really makes human intelligence on Earth more likely to be unique. Seems almost ridiculously long odds that humanoid aliens evolved on some other planet. Even if there are creatures as intelligent as dolphins they are not necessarily going to be capable of monitoring interplanetary signals. Dolphins will round up a school of fish for you using their sonar but they don't have dishes and telescopes.

Gliese 581 is much older than Earth so if evolution does eventually create similar results, maybe they would have been capable of observing the 47 Tucanae event and correlating that with a directed signal from Earth saying essentially "did you see that event that we saw 20 years ago"? Maybe they were actually targeting Earth bound children?

All the atomic bomb testing here on Earth should have given any nearby Aliens a clue something was going on with this planet.

Originally posted by Dispo

How exciting.

Looking at it again... could it be that they started out on one planet and colonized the other 2?

reply to post by Bone75


That's what I've always thought to be honest. If I had to guess, I'd say the "large" planet would be their original home world.

It would take twenty years to get there traveling at the speed of light. Since we cannot get anywhere near that speed it would most likely take about a thousand years or more. However, what is more interesting than us going to seek out and destroy another planet with our greed and avarice, our bacterium and viruses...is that finally science has gotten wise to the fact that a habitable alien planet with life on it which might like to communicate with others, would not do that with out-of-date radio signals...but rather with something like light. And if Seti received this "odd pulse" from whence did it originate and could it contain a message? Certainly it said: Look over here!