Author Topic: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules  (Read 19436 times)

Offline Star One

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An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« on: 08/27/2016 09:04 pm »
It comes from a system 95 light years distant with at least one known exoplanet and a star not so dissimilar to the Sun in metallicity but older with an estimated age of 6.3 billion years.

Quote
A candidate signal for SETI is a welcome sign that our efforts in that direction may one day pay off. An international team of researchers has announced the detection of “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595” in a document now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov. The detection was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in the Karachay–Cherkess Republic of Russia, not far from the border with Georgia in the Caucasus.

The signal was received on May 15, 2015, 18:01:15.65 (sidereal time), at a wavelength of 2.7 cm. The estimated amplitude of the signal is 750 mJy.

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Here I’m drawing on a presentation forwarded to me by Claudio Maccone, from which I learn that the team behind the detection was led by N.N. Bursov and included L.N. Filippova, V.V. Filippov, L.M. Gindilis, A.D. Panov, E.S. Starikov, J. Wilson, as well as Claudio Maccone himself, the latter a familiar figure on Centauri Dreams. The work is to be discussed at a meeting of the IAA SETI Permanent Committee, to be held during the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, September 27th, 2016,

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36248
« Last Edit: 08/27/2016 09:05 pm by Star One »

Offline redliox

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #1 on: 08/27/2016 09:26 pm »
Hmm at 95 light years not the closest neighbor.  Assuming a civilization is there, I don't think this signal could have been sent intentionally, or at least with knowledge that our planet harbored intelligence; 95 years ago we were barely into the radio age, and including two-way communication that's 190 years, well before electronics here on Earth.  The only thing the aliens may have detected between 190-95 years ago would have been the start of the industrial age as we started polluting the atmosphere of Earth and perhaps the start of city lights appearing on the dark half of our planet.

Worth investigating at least.  The star is essentially a twin of our sun.  The layout of the system would be different, as the current tallied exoplanet is a hot (or warm) Neptune sitting roughly where Mercury would be; there could still be something at Earth or Mars distance.
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Offline Star One

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #2 on: 08/27/2016 09:38 pm »
I wonder if this star is yet another of the Sun's brothers from its stellar nursery. But I suppose it's too old for that assuming the age is correct.

Just assuming for a minute that it is aliens for the sake of argument you might speculate they could have sent a probe towards us when they detected changes in our atmosphere & that could have picked up our radio transmissions.
« Last Edit: 08/27/2016 09:42 pm by Star One »

Offline Johnnyhinbos

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #3 on: 08/28/2016 08:03 am »
It comes from a system 95 light years distant with at least one known exoplanet and a star not so dissimilar to the Sun in metallicity but older with an estimated age of 6.3 billion years.

Quote
A candidate signal for SETI is a welcome sign that our efforts in that direction may one day pay off. An international team of researchers has announced the detection of “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595” in a document now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov. The detection was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in the Karachay–Cherkess Republic of Russia, not far from the border with Georgia in the Caucasus.

The signal was received on May 15, 2015, 18:01:15.65 (sidereal time), at a wavelength of 2.7 cm. The estimated amplitude of the signal is 750 mJy.

Quote
Here I’m drawing on a presentation forwarded to me by Claudio Maccone, from which I learn that the team behind the detection was led by N.N. Bursov and included L.N. Filippova, V.V. Filippov, L.M. Gindilis, A.D. Panov, E.S. Starikov, J. Wilson, as well as Claudio Maccone himself, the latter a familiar figure on Centauri Dreams. The work is to be discussed at a meeting of the IAA SETI Permanent Committee, to be held during the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, September 27th, 2016,

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36248


Huh - during the same conference that Elon is laying out his Mars architecture. Wow, the IAC is getting better and better...
« Last Edit: 08/28/2016 02:02 pm by Johnnyhinbos »
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Offline Bynaus

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #4 on: 08/28/2016 10:24 am »
Note the comment by Jean Schneider (a co-author on the original paper and editor of the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia) on the CD article: better don't get your hopes up too much - might well be gravitational lensing of a background source by the star in question. But certainly worth monitoring for a time.
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Offline Star One

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #5 on: 08/28/2016 11:47 am »
Note the comment by Jean Schneider (a co-author on the original paper and editor of the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia) on the CD article: better don't get your hopes up too much - might well be gravitational lensing of a background source by the star in question. But certainly worth monitoring for a time.

Yeah I saw that as well. If it repeats then we might have something to get excited for as a lensing event would be more likely a one off even if produced by the star itself.
« Last Edit: 08/28/2016 06:40 pm by Star One »

Offline Star One

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #6 on: 08/29/2016 10:05 am »
This article contains a number of updates on this story.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/signal-seti-interest-hd164595/


Offline space_dreamer

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #8 on: 08/29/2016 07:50 pm »
Could this be real ???

Offline ugordan

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #9 on: 08/29/2016 07:58 pm »

Online Robotbeat

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #10 on: 08/29/2016 09:17 pm »
Right. This is already being discussed here:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=41021.0
(It's probably gravitational lensing, by the by.)

Edit/Lar: I merged the topics together...
« Last Edit: 08/29/2016 09:35 pm by Lar »
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Offline kevin-rf

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #11 on: 08/29/2016 09:28 pm »
Quote
"Baffling" "signal" "from HD 164595" is probably none of the above.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?nowrap=true&id=80193

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Offline Star One

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An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #12 on: 08/30/2016 05:58 am »
As a general comment SETI sometimes seem to suffer from a resolutely negative attitude that they'd probably dismiss it when an actual signal did turn up.
« Last Edit: 08/30/2016 06:02 am by Star One »

Offline Ben the Space Brit

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #13 on: 08/30/2016 10:05 am »
I think it's a sensible and healthy attitude. Too many false positives and hopes raised for nothing would ultimately degrade the work of the scientists on this search and make funding harder to come by. Better to say: "We have an anomaly and we're going through the possible causes one by one - an intelligent signal is the last one on the list." That way, you're not leaving yourself open to being accused of being a moonbat or worse by the sensationalist press and not giving the more... excitable on-line commentators too much fuel.
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Offline Star One

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #14 on: 08/30/2016 12:03 pm »
I think it's a sensible and healthy attitude. Too many false positives and hopes raised for nothing would ultimately degrade the work of the scientists on this search and make funding harder to come by. Better to say: "We have an anomaly and we're going through the possible causes one by one - an intelligent signal is the last one on the list." That way, you're not leaving yourself open to being accused of being a moonbat or worse by the sensationalist press and not giving the more... excitable on-line commentators too much fuel.

But it's an incredible fine line to tread in my view, and with seemingly a lot of candidate signals it does make me worry they will miss something of actual significance.

Offline Orbiter

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #15 on: 08/30/2016 12:08 pm »
Quote
"Baffling" "signal" "from HD 164595" is probably none of the above.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?nowrap=true&id=80193

Harsh....

This tidbit was especially interesting, IMO. Not even as significant as the WOW! Signal:

Quote
I wouldn't put it in the same category as the Wow! signal. The Wow! signal was narrow band, and because of that, more likely to indicate intelligence than this event.
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Online meekGee

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #16 on: 08/30/2016 05:50 pm »
SETI is the opposite of careful and responsible PR.

There's always a disclaimer, but the tone is always leading the casual reader to false excitement.

Seems to be working for them, but nothing to see here, as always.
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Offline ugordan

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #17 on: 08/30/2016 06:18 pm »
SETI is the opposite of careful and responsible PR.

There's always a disclaimer, but the tone is always leading the casual reader to false excitement.

Seems to be working for them, but nothing to see here, as always.

Totally unlike the water-on-Mars stories or discoveries of the next Earth 2.0 exoplanet, but promise, this time it's real!

It's not as if the media is blameless when it comes to blowing something out of proportion. Which brings me to my questions:

1) When exactly was the last SETI signal claim, which you seem to imply happen so often?
2) Would this even be picked up by anyone if it wasn't originally mentioned on Centauri Dreams?

It's not as if this claim was sent to all media outlets in the world.

Another analogy, rumors about LHC discoveries of new particles, the latest being the infamous 750 GeV resonance which was picked up by many media as well. How very careless and irresponsible of CERN to allow such a thing to happen...
« Last Edit: 08/30/2016 06:22 pm by ugordan »

Online meekGee

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Re: An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #18 on: 08/30/2016 11:16 pm »
SETI is the opposite of careful and responsible PR.

There's always a disclaimer, but the tone is always leading the casual reader to false excitement.

Seems to be working for them, but nothing to see here, as always.

Totally unlike the water-on-Mars stories or discoveries of the next Earth 2.0 exoplanet, but promise, this time it's real!

It's not as if the media is blameless when it comes to blowing something out of proportion. Which brings me to my questions:

1) When exactly was the last SETI signal claim, which you seem to imply happen so often?
2) Would this even be picked up by anyone if it wasn't originally mentioned on Centauri Dreams?

It's not as if this claim was sent to all media outlets in the world.

Another analogy, rumors about LHC discoveries of new particles, the latest being the infamous 750 GeV resonance which was picked up by many media as well. How very careless and irresponsible of CERN to allow such a thing to happen...

NASA,CERN - those are institutions that contributed an immense amount of knowledge to their respective fields, and have a hug body of work to rest on.  Sometimes, scientists from these institutions were a bit too hasty with PRs, though usually the media had a lot to do with it.

SETI, not the same, not even close.

We're not talking about an argument on whether a 2-sigma signal is enough to issue a statement on.

There is nothing about this radio signal that says it could even remotely be from an intelligent source.  SETI folks knows that, and their PR carefully skirts around it while still talking at great lengths about all the stuff that they say this signal is not...


 
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Offline Star One

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An interesting SETI candidate in Hercules
« Reply #19 on: 08/31/2016 06:18 am »
Now reported on Radio 4 this morning, truly this story has taken on a life of its own.

I am not sure you holding CERN up as good example is such a great idea as they effectively did the same as you accuse SETI of doing with that 750 signal that actually turned out to be nothing, but at the time effectively bigging it up in the media whilst saying at the same time oh it will probably turn out to be nothing. What I am getting at is trying to point an accusatory finger at one organisation when they've all gone down this line at one time or another isn't very helpful.
« Last Edit: 08/31/2016 06:34 am by Star One »

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