There are a lot of really solid scientists putting thought and observational time toward looking for life orbiting other stars. From searching for biosignatures in atmospheres to looking for technosignatures like radio signals or laser pulses, researchers are looking in a variety of ways.
While this hasn’t found us definitive evidence of alien life, it has found some weird things, including, most recently, some super high-speed pulses in the light of sun-like stars. Retired JPL astronomer Richard Stanton has been using a 30cm telescope at Big Bear Observatory to look for optical signals of alien life. On three different data sets, he detected pairs of pulses that lasted just fractions of a second and were a few seconds apart in time. Since a massive star can’t change in brightness as fast as these pulses change, the source has to be something else – either an interloping source, or some optical shenanigans.
In a truly delightful paper in Acta Astronautica, he compares two of these sets of pulses to a variety of things known to mess with observers, including planes, satellites, meteors, and even birds.
Yes, folks, he includes a plot of starlight over time for a star being observed while a big ol’ bird flies in front of the telescope.
Since he was out looking for signs of alien life, it is an easy jump for people to say, well, couldn’t these pulses be that sign? As always, and as I shall repeat as often as needed, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In this case, good old physics can explain what is seen. When the edge of an object blocks light, the wave nature of light can cause a brief brightening prior to darkening. Easy peasy…
At least sort of.
While this is a good match, it would require two events to create two blips, and that implies there is some sort of a ring hanging out somewhere in our solar system periodically blocking light… or alternatively – this is me reading graphs – a pair of objects that are really close in size flying around blocking light one after another. That is also super weird… As Stanton points out, “If anything like this were found, it would immediately raise the questions of where it came from and how it could survive millions of years of collisions with other objects. … Whatever is found, those speculating that our best chance of finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence lies within our own solar system, might have much to ponder!”