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.
No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study. Working out the strength of the signal, the researchers say that if it came from an isotropic beacon, it would be of a power possible only for a Kardashev Type II civilization. If it were a narrow beam signal focused on our Solar System, it would be of a power available to a Kardashev Type I civilization. The possibility of noise of one form or another cannot be ruled out, and researchers in Paris led by Jean Schneider are considering the possible microlensing of a background source by HD164595. But the signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target.
Image: The RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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,
What we know of HD 164595 is that it is a star of 0.99 solar masses at a distance of roughly 95 light years in the constellation Hercules, and an estimated age of 6.3 billion years. Its metallicity is almost identical to that of the Sun. A known planet in this system, HD 164595 b, is 0.05 Jupiter mass with a period of 40 days, considered to be a warm Neptune on a circular orbit. There could, of course, be other planets still undetected in this system.
Image: Strong signal from the direction of HD 164595. “Raw” record of the signal together with expected shape of the signal for point-like source in the position of HD 164595. Credit: Bursov et al.
From the presentation:
The estimated probability ~2 X 10-4 to simulate the signal from the direction of the HD164595 by signal-like noise is small, therefore HD164595 is good candidate SETI. Permanent monitoring of this target is needed.
All of which makes excellent sense. We can’t claim the detection of an extraterrestrial civilization from this observation. What we can say is that the signal is interesting and merits further scrutiny.
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Well, the contest of “the most interesting star in our galaxy” (or another example of crying wolf scenario) has just begun; Tabby’s will be on top of the list either next year or in 2018, this cycle will go on and on until a real one shows up or we manage to create a robotic wolf looking real enough to fool ourselves.
In mean time, when a certain new version of AlphaGo has capabilities to beat world #1 professional human Go player who is allowed to make 9 moves before the game starts, we must be forced to think one way or another.
If anybody is intrested in the way plants can perceive communication through biological agent. you must contact Stefano mancuso. His First and only scientific lab is preparing a robot that can transmitte and receive informatie by using the biological means from plant. They are likely to use it on Mars. It seems a almost direct Communications. You could compare it with the quantem experiment where as the change of two parts seems to be happening spontanues over Large disctance.
Plant communication is a known given; it’s been suspected for decades but no one was taken seriously until some test recently. I know about it through the pain in the butt of having adopted the no-till gardening technique but I think this study might have been in Nature or something similar. The mechanism by which some plants can communicate thankfully made a lot of sense when I read about it with zero wu-wu involved.
No QT either; I think it was just germs.
It is primarily chemical. A plant can transmit information about the environment via both volatiles from the leaves and other compounds from their roots. This is analogous to the chemical signaling of microbes, e.g. quorum sensing.
Most probably the signaling is based on simple diffusion and concentration. I have sometimes speculated whether plants and fungi that spread in a connected fashion might not be able to detect and transmit responses to patterns of environmental information much like neural networks.
Two more takes on the HD 164595 event. Here:
http://www.cnet.com/news/alien-signal-likely-isnt-but-if-it-is-theyre-way-smarter-than-us/
And…
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/08/31/about-that-promising-seti-signal/#.V8mBa3oTawY
Simple, it is a bluff! Hehehehe… Gaining fame with this foolish “close encounter” tells how bad we are doing as a “civilization”. If there is another alien civilization more avance than ours, there is no way they want to contact us… The reason is very obvious… Human Beings are an alien civilization very dificult to understand, violent, and lack of common senses… Only in the case we are able to solve our terrestrial “conflicts” and living a life with complete ethical and moral values, then and only then, we will have the chance to discover extraterrestial life. Meanwhile, it is only in our dreams and dreams do not cost anything. When we stop destroying our own “alien life”, then we will be able to have real “close encounters” with other Worlds in this so far “infinite” SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER…
One more:
http://www.universetoday.com/130550/going-viral-alien-signals-get-everyone-excited/
At least this upcoming “encounter” with ETI seems more intelligent than most of the press and social media responses to HD 164595 so far:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-first-reviews-of-arrival-are-in-and-theyre-out-of-t-1786054617
At least I know it will not disappoint like Interstellar did:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=32136
question for ljk: what made this signal so interesting. Have we heard this exact signal before… say 1920 or 1977.
Not exactly. The reason that the Wow! Signal of 1977 keeps being mentioned with the one reportedly from HD 164595 is that they were both transient. This means they were only detected once and not heard from again. SETI science needs more than one transmission for confirmation. Otherwise the 1977 and 2016 signals are different in the finer details.
To add, the other reason the Wow! Signal of 1977 gets mentioned so often is because it has become legendary, even though other suspect transient radio signals have been detected over the years.
For example, the signal detected in 2010 coming from a star named TYC 1220-91-1 was even better than the 1977 signal and deserves far more interest and research than it has gotten.
I may have missed this, but I am surprised that I have not seen a mention of the CTA-102 event of 1965. As explained here:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/CTA102.html
CTA-102 is a powerful celestial source of radio waves, catalogued in the early 1960s by the California Institute of Technology, and proposed, in 1963, by N. S. Kardashev in the scientifically conservative Astronomical Journal of the USSR as evidence of a Type Two or Type Three Kardashev civilization. A worldwide sensation followed a TASS agency announcement that Gennady Sholomitskii of the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, following up Kardashev’s idea, had found CTA-102 to be the beacon of a “supercivilization”.1 Shortly after, observations from Palomar Observatory identified CTA-102 with a quasar.
Reference
1. Sholomitskii, G. B. “Variability of the Radio Source CTA-102,” Information Bulletin on Variable Stars, Commission 27 of the IAU, no. 83 (February 27, 1965).
I could have sworn that CTA-102 had been detected by RATAN-600, but according to this list of historical SETI projects linked to next, it was detected in a 1963-1964 SETI conducted at the Crimea Deep Space Station by none other than Kardashev himself – apparently only the second official SETI after Ozma in 1960.
http://www.seti.net/indepth/history/history.php
How big was the news of this detection at the time? Enough that the rock band The Byrds wrote a song titled C.T.A. 102:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1mXIiM9QjA
As I have said elsewhere here, the Soviets were much more enthusiastic about SETI back then and far more open to various ideas on how advanced aliens might contact humanity, or otherwise be found by us:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/SETI_critical_history_SETI_Soviet_critique.html
A slightly more informative list including Kardashev’s SETI here, with links to two references:
http://archive.seti.org/seti/seti-background/previous-searches/archive_60s.php#2
I am adding this bit of Soviet SETI history because somewhere earlier in this long thread someone had asked how far a nuclear explosion could be seen in deep space.
Well, none other than Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov – the Soviet father of the hydrogen bomb – wrote a letter in 1971 explaining how we might signal ETI by setting off strings of nuclear explosions at the edge of the Sol system:
http://lnfm1.sai.msu.ru/SETI/eng/articles/sakharov.html
And who knew that the Soviet space probe Mars 7 was used to conduct Optical SETI! Yes, its lander may have missed the entire planet in 1974 but the probe did do its part in the search for alien beings.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1973-053A
Would love to find more details on that SETI project. Anyone have this paper available to read:
GINDILIS, L.M., DUBINSKIJ, B.A. and RUDNITSKIJ, G.M., “SETI Investigations in the USSR,” paper #IAA-88-544, presented at IAF Congress, Bangalore, India (1988).
500 Comments. “Wow” Haha.
Anyway, it’s now the stated opinion of the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics in Moscow that their signal from HD 164595 came from a local source. https://www.sao.ru/Doc-en/SciNews/2016/Sotnikova/
Read those last two paragraphs carefully. They do not actually reveal much and state that more research needs to be done. Plus we are apparently going to have to wait for the science team to release their results later this month at a science conference in Mexico.
The Russian officials who made that statement are *suspecting* the signal came from a military satellite, but they do not provide any actual evidence for this. Even if it turns out that the signal did come from a satellite and not 94.5 light years away in a remote star system and they are speaking from factual knowledge, they have not provided any details to the public, so until then it is just speculation.
As I have said multiple times elsewhere in this thread, most of the media, the so-called experts, and the general public have accepted the “official” Russian answer without further question and almost as a sense of relief – It’s not aliens! We can go back to thinking we are still the Most Important (and Probably Only) Intelligent Beings in the Whole Universe!
I also get the feeling that the Russian Academy of Sciences’ authorities are somewhat embarrassed at the attention which they probably feel is making them look rather foolish to their peers and other authorities as the concept of aliens still has a stigma with our culture – even though the Soviets were more gung-ho about SETI and METI back in the day than even the Americans.
So they whipped out a quick press release saying it was just a military satellite (one of theirs, of course) and those “silly” scientists made a mistake, so now would everyone please go away? And most people did fall for it because we are trained to obey anyone in a suit or uniform, or lab coat.
The Russian science team has not revealed all their cards yet, though they said early on they did NOT think it was a satellite (and they should know). Unless there is a leak we will have to wait until later this month, but I suspect they did find something of interest – and it does not necessarily mean those pesky aliens.
ljk, I sympathize with you. The simple fact is that the RATAN600 is a little decrepid and not currently capable of determining much out of it’s signal. But, that’s not critical. Continued monitoring of HD164595 by more advanced antennae would have been required anyway. Hopefully, that will be done despite the reports of this signal’s terrestrial origin.
Is there any content in that signal? If i would send a strong signal i would compress it in order to keep the signal as short as possible.
If HD 164595 is host to a planet with ETI, and if they have FTL communication ability, will they please send me the location of the nearest Pikachu in Pokemon GO?
In seriousness, on the ETI subject, i.e. Tabby’s Star, I am and always have been on ljk’s side of the issues involved. ljk’s analysis is always top drawer.
And when it comes to this topic or any that appears on Centauri Dreams, if Paul Gilster reports it then it is to be taken most seriously. Paul is the best space exploration reporter on this planet. As I’ve said before, we are in a very fortunate place to have Paul Gilster; the articles produced by his interest, effort and ability are unprecedented in quantity and quality.
Eric, you are too kind! I could never claim to be the best at this kind of reporting, but I do love what I do and hope I can keep it up. And I thank you for being a long-term reader who has enriched the site with your comments over the years.
I’d like to second Eric Lindahl’s sentiments.
I’m a retired evolutionary biologist (from UMass/Amherst) with a background in astrophysics. I’ve been interested for many years in exobiology, and also in SETI, and so I’m open-minded in the usual scientific, “horses-not-zebras” way.
I discovered this site a couple of years ago, and needed some time to determine that Centauri Dreams isn’t just another internet colony of crazies. I do appreciate the skeptical, reasoned care with which matters of SETI are approached here.
Thanks so much, Richard. Very pleased to have you here!
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