SETI Fails To Detect Signals Coming From KIC 8462852 (examiner.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Rare excitement spread through the scientific community and the media when data from the Kepler Space Telescope indicated something strange going on around a star 1,500 light years away called KIC 8462852. An analysis of the pattern of light coming from the star suggested that a swarm of smaller objects was orbiting the planet. Scientists narrowed down the possible explanations for the data to either a swarm of comets or a group of alien megastructures. According to a story in Space Daily, an examination of KIC 8462852 by SETI, using the Allen Telescope Array, has failed to find any evidence that ET exists around that particular star.

Comments

Re:This assumes they are using radio waves, correc

[Kjella]

If ET were there, transmitting on RF with the same power we use for radio/TV signals - our detectors aren't even good enough to hear it over noise.

From what I understand it's primarily going to pick up military radar or intentional "pings", signal broadcast is very weak compared to radars trying to detect stealth aircraft that is diverting 99%+ of the signal away from the source. There's not really any reason to send radio/TV signals with that power and for information efficiency we're going to encode them so they're almost indistinguishable from noise anyway. The latter is obviously the best since they're the only ones likely to have any information content we could positively identify. So at least for our current level of technology they have to want to be found.