Alien life has been an extremely popular topic for debate in the year 2016. Now a new set of search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) claims suggest that there may be aliens out there, sending out signals to other alien life forms.
A team of scientists has claimed that that may have discovered the "spectral signature of messages" from an alien civilization, according to Geekwire. It is not the claim that has created a controversy, but the fact that these claims should be published or not is what everybody is debating about.
These claims have been drafted by researchers Eric Trottier and Ermanno Borra from the Laval University in Quebec in a research paper. The paper is scheduled to be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
During the study, Trottier and Borra claim to have scrutinized 2.5 million readings from distant stars. The readings were recorded by Sloan Digital Sky Survey and they specify the periodic variation that may appear in the spectral characteristics of the starlight.
In the light coming from the stars that resembled the sun, the researchers noticed a periodic variation in the spectral pattern. Such stars were 234 in number.
The astronomers believe that if the light pulses would have come from an extraterrestrial intelligence, same shape of variation would have been produced. Borra had earlier indicated in a research paper that such signals act as an evidence of alien signal.
However, the paper considers extraterrestrial intelligence as the only source of the variation and rules out other possibilities that could be behind the pattern. The hypothesis requires further work to confirm whether these variations are actually SETI signals.
Other astronomers argue that such hypotheses need extraordinary evidences of alien life. They believe that these spectral patterns could also emerge because of error in data analysis or calibration.
