From John Wenz at Astronomy News:
It’s (probably) not aliens, yet again.
The slightest whiff of aliens is enough to send the public into a frenzy. There have been quiet rumblings after a pre-print paper was released on ArXiv from two French-Canadian researchers who interpreted certain sky signal data to be possibly of intelligent extraterrestrial origin.
But
“Apparently several — more than three or four — referees have been disinclined to see this published,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute says in an email. “I am quite skeptical, in particular of the data processing that can take spectrally sampled data, and infer time variations. So I’d be a little careful.”More.
We can be sure that if there were anything in the most recent claim, SETI would be backing it, ot disowning it, as now.
The putative signals come from data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey:
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has created the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe ever made, with deep multi-color images of one third of the sky, and spectra for more than three million astronomical objects. Learn and explore all phases and surveys—past, present, and future—of the SDSS.
See also: World’s largest telescope to hunt for alien life
and
How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? No one is saying he isn’t out there. But what if we are simply not able to grapple with the idea?
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