More scientists are now believing that signals beamed by 234 pulsating stars are an indication of possible alien life in the universe. Astronomers are also telling their colleagues to go beyond radio signals while searching for alien life.
The statement follows another message by two scientists at Laval University in Quebec that strange behaviour of 234 stars out of 2.5 million stars catalogued by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey indicates something close to intelligent behavior.
The spectral modulation behaviour in the 234 stars, changing colours in repeating patterns made Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier arrive at the conclusion that such modulations might have been created deliberately by aliens, according to CS Monitor. "...what if our interstellar visitors choose to show rather than tell? Our ears, so to speak, have long been open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life - is it time we opened our eyes?"
"Some surveys have used lasers and other forms of optical light to communicate, but matter tends to get in the way," Jeffrey Coughlin, a SETI Institute consultant for NASA's Kepler Mission, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview. "There's not much that can slow down radio waves."
"If there's another civilization out there that's at all like us," he adds, "radio is the best way we know to communicate."
Many members of the astronomical community expressed some doubt that the ETs could create these signals in the "pulsating stars." In an earlier paper, Borra had noted that the stars are consistent with those from remote civilisations, in which extremely rapid optical pulses were sent by extraterrestrials.
It was last year that the giant star KIC 8462852 beamed out light patterns that differed from other stars. These signals could be beamed out by light pulses from extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), according to the scientists who published their observations on Oct 14 in the journal, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
"We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis," Borra says.
