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SETI Researcher Quashes Signal Rumors

Posted by michael on from the killing-my-dreams dept.

brainstyle writes "According to Dan Wertheimer of SETI the whole ET signal excitement is more hype than science. I told myself it was in all likelihood nothing special, but I'm still disappointed. Darn."

4 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories but... by fzammett · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I try to keep the tinfoil hat in the closet as much as possible, but one can't resist...

    Yesterday, we get this quote from Dan Wertheimer:

    "It's the most interesting signal from SETI@home. We're not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it."

    but today we get:

    "It's all hype and noise. We have nothing that is unusual. It's all out of proportion."

    and we also get Paul Horowitz:

    "It's not much of anything at all. We're not investigating it further."

    So yesterday the chief scientist for the project says it's the most interesting signal (which in and of itself just means it was a little different than the rest) and that they will continue to investigate it. But now today it's just a bunch of media hype and they aren't investigating it any further (I'm not sure who Horowitz actually is, but it seems a safe assumption, based on his comment, that he's associated with the project".

    Yes, it COULD just be a case of "Oh wow!... Oh no, wait, nothing". Or it could be an outright coverup. I suspect it's something in between, but chains of comments like these really do lead a person down a particular path.

    --
    If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
  2. Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by Eloquence · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The BBC article is certainly high on denial and short on substance. I particularly dislike the intro: " It was reported on the internet that the signal had been found .." - Oh, these wacky Internet people are at it again. The New Scientist is also a print publication, and it did not report that a signal had been found, it reported that there was a particularly strong candidate signal, which showed certain interesting oddities which may very well rule it out from being artificial:

    There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that's rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.

    This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.

    Fishy and puzzling

    The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is "fishy", he says. "If [the aliens] are so smart, they'll adjust their signal for their planet's motion."

    The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.

    What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. "It just boggles my mind," Korpela says.

    Now, in light of these facts, which are not denied in the BBC article, the "We're not investigating it further" type responses certainly sound like an attempt to prevent the media from getting their panties in a twist. "Actually it was a reflection from a weather balloon..."

    I hope SETI does investigate. That's the whole point of the project, isn't it?

  3. Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by DHR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lots of denial, without any explanations. We want to know why its all hype and noise, why it's not unusual, and why it's not a signal. In short, what did they realize it was?

  4. Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, I'd be the last person to expect aliens to come calling from space, but I'm not against investigation. If you have several interesting signals from the same area of the sky, then it only makes sense to point a radio telescope at it for at least a few days and both monitor the hydrogen emmission continuously for a while, and also check the rest of the spectrum.

    I wouldn't be surprised if the signal only showed up periodially if it were artificial. After all, they would probably be scanning the sky with a high-gain antenna. They'd expect a recipient to figure out the period and then be ready to capture whatever higher-speed data is being sent on some other frequency, or something like that.

    Most likely this is just a natural phenomena. However, that makes it just as useful to study - it means we can learn something just the same...