Breaking News: Have We Detected 234 Alien Civilizations?

By John Michael Godier

Several days ago a paper came out that made an interesting claim. That claim was that anomalous signals from 234 stars in the Milky Way of types similar to our sun were emitting pulsed, regular signals consistent with what you would expect from alien civilizations employing laser communications.

While the media at large loves to take stories like this and sensationalize them and make all sorts of clickbait headlines that lead people to believe that aliens are discovered weekly, that's obviously not the case, and this particular paper is very preliminary but does still fall into the realm of possibility.

The paper authored by researchers Ermanno Borra and E. Trottier, details a study of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that looked for periodic fluctuations in the spectra of stars in the galaxy that were abnormal but consistent with a pulsed signal from an alien civilization. They found abnormal signals coming from 234 different stars.

But, abnormal doesn't immediately mean alien so much study and work will be needed to determine exactly what's going on with these stars. I stress, this story is more about figuring out a new way to detect alien signals rather than actually making the claim to have detected them. Take this one with a grain of salt, that's probably not what these are. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

The whole thing goes back to an earlier paper that Borra authored in 2012. In it, Borra posits that it should be possible to detect pulsed laser signals from alien civilizations mixed within the natural spectra of the stars that their homeworlds orbit.

Borra backs this up by pointing out that our current technology could produce such signals that would be detectable by other species if they were looking, using these same methods. That's if we made the effort to try to contact other races. We currently are not.  

Now, what is a spectrum? Think of it like this; stars have a sort of fingerprint made of light that reveals information about them. At its most basic level, it's simply using a prism to split light into its constituent rainbow spectrum and looking for dark lines that appear in the spectrum. These lines, called Fraunhofer lines, are caused by certain materials present in the star that absorb different frequencies of light. This yields information about the star's chemical makeup.

But you can tell much more from how those lines are arranged and shifted, such as if the star is moving towards you or away from you, of even if obscuring dips in the light are due to diffuse dust and gas or gigantic alien megastructures as what everyone's waiting for with KIC 8462852, and many other things.

And, luckily, astronomers have taken lots of spectra over the years while studying stars. A lot to the tune of huge sky surveys such as the Sloan survey which detail the spectra of at least 2.5 million stars at this point. Borra argued in 2012 that you could search those existing spectra for signs of alien civilizations using pretty straightforward methods.

Fast forward to today. Borra and Trottier did just that and out of the 2.5 million spectra they found 234 anomalous ones that could fit the bill for alien communications. That's a pretty tiny percentage, perhaps what you might expect given that intelligent alien life is probably pretty rare, but we don't really know.

But what was interesting about those spectrums is that the associated stars just happened to be overwhelmingly sun-like, meaning that the stars were of sufficient age and stability to reasonably say that it's possible for them to have civilizations developing around them based on the conditions of our own solar system and our development. Interesting results to be sure.

But, and the authors are careful to point this out, it's just that. Interesting and worth checking out. These signals are very weak, and while the argument can be made that aliens need not transmit using huge amounts of energy just to say hello, stars themselves can be really enigmatic and naturally produce all manner of strange signals.

We've seen some strange stuff with stars before that ended up having fully natural explanations. Natural is always very much more likely than artificial. There's a lot of variation in how stars behave due to a mind-boggling array of chemical and physical factors that can be present within them, to the point that we often come across stars we don't quite understand. There are anomalous stars out there that are so bizarre that they shouldn't even exist. But they do, which means we just haven't thought of a way to explain them yet. That's likely to the be the case with these anomalous stars.

Further study is likely to show that most, if not all, of these 234 anomalies are of natural origin. But, then again, if NASA itself is to be believed, it's also probably likely that within just a few decades we will have discovered evidence of intelligent alien life and studying stellar spectra is just one more tool we can use to accomplish that.