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New Optical SETI Discovery
| but at what cost | 05/20/25 |
| Mainlining the $ecret Truth of the Univer$e | 05/21/25 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: May 20th, 2025 11:59 PM Author: but at what cost SETI is often thought of in terms of radioastronomy looking for alien radio and that is indeed a very large part of it. But in another sense it's more broad than that. It is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence after all and it does cover more areas of the electromagnetic spectrum than just radio. One burgeoning area of SETI that has become increasingly important is optical SETI. The optical regime has been advanced as potentially better and more coherent than radio. And lo and behold, there has been a detection of a potential candidate optical signal for which aliens are on the table. Whether that turns out to be the case or not, this new candidate or candidates actually there are three at this point seems to be something extremely weird. If it's of natural origin, it is something we've never seen before. In a paper by Richard Stanton, links to all materials in the description below, he details a multi-year survey of sunlike stars, over 1300 of them, looking for optical city signals outside of the range of what a normal star should be doing. As an aside here, the term sunlike star is a bit misleading as it is broader than an identical copy of the sun. In its loosest sense, it includes the main sequence stars of type M or red dwarfs, type K or orange dwarfs, type G, this is the sun, and are called yellow dwarfs, though that term is misleading and outdated, and sometimes type F stars are added into this loose definition. This survey has yielded some interesting results. In short, candidates have appeared, interestingly, from three different sources. Dr. Stanton is a retired veteran jet propulsion laboratory scientist and engineer that worked on the Voyager and Grace missions and since retiring has been engaged in optical SETI using the Shea Meadow Observatory in California which has a 30-in telescope. Connected to this telescope is a multi-channel photometer that he designed and built. A photometer is a device that just measures the intensity of light. It's basically a scaled up version of a light meter like those used in photography. You are just looking at how intense the light is and how it varies. The main thing that optical SETI is looking for are laser communications or propulsion leakage from a light sail or even the beaming of energy from the energy collection components of a Dyson swarm. As I mentioned, there have been suggestions in the past that optical SETI may actually be more fruitful than radio. There is a paper from 1961 by Schwarz and Towns that details one way that this could be. And effectively what they describe is a civilization beaming out intense laser pulses very rapidly on the level of nanconds extremely brightly, brighter than their home star. In fact, these pulses are what Dr. Stanton searches for. How this is done is straightforward. The telescope is pointed at a single star for about an hour at a time, just staring at the star. The photometer is then used to take very rapid fire samplings of the stars light at basically 100 micro seconds each. This actually gives a very high resolution timeline for that hour-long observation of that single star. This allows the observation to be searched for pulses. This is an increasingly important area of astronomy. It used to be that observations were done infrequently. A star might get photographed or otherwise measured in a survey once or twice a year, sometimes more, sometimes less. But at that cadence, it's unlikely to catch transient phenomena that don't last long. There has been a call within astronomy that resulted in such things like survey telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory to photograph at a higher cadence of as much of the sky as we can. But as another famous photometer showed, there is a lot within the notion of transient phenomena. That was Kepler. And Kepler stared at one patch of the sky in Cygnus for 3 years, creating very detailed light curves. And from that, a number of oddly behaving stars were observed. The most famous of these was Taby's star, and we still do not have a clear idea of exactly what is going on there. Kepler however took its samples at around once per half hour and that would not have seen these new signals. So the first signal in question here was a detection at the star HD89389 which is an F-type star, a type somewhat more massive than the sun and hotter but still on the main sequence which incidentally tabby star was also an F-type star. The star in question is in the constellation Ursa Major. And what was seen were two mysterious rapid optical pulses that were separated by 4.4 seconds. Even stranger, the two pulses were virtually identical in structure in the light curve. That's weird. Now, astronomy is noisy. Optical is just as bad as radio for interference. Technological interference includes satellites glinting. Imagine how confounding Starlink is. Planes, Chinese lanterns, fireworks, search lights, rocket launches, and so on that can send misleading light into a telescope. Natural interference includes lightning. Though, if you see that, it's probably time to close up the telescope dome, but also meteors and even birds. And then there is the atmosphere itself with atmospheric scintillation. The atmosphere moving around makes stars twinkle and that's going to confound a photometer. Indeed, this type of observation is very dependent on good seeing as much as it is clear skies. Stanton, however, was able to eliminate all of these as to having caused this. And in the paper, it's shown what each of those types of interference phenomena looks like through his instrumentation. And whatever those pulses were, they fit none of that. Actually, to be clear, they don't look anything like that stuff. What happens with these detections is the star gets bright, goes faint very briefly, then bright again, and then goes back to its normal base level, all in about 0.2 seconds. That's strange, but it also actually is a count against these signals actually coming from the star itself. Stars are huge, needless to say. And to cause one to dim overall in less than a second doesn't work. Stars can't act that quickly in variations of their brightness. Too huge. Nor can anything in orbit of its star. It's too fast. So, whatever is occluding the star has to have been significantly closer to Earth than the star is. Normally, the main suspect here might be a glitch in the detector. Equipment noise happens. However, this does not seem likely at this point because there is a third detection that was seen on January 18th of this year, plus a completely separate star seen doing this from a totally different observatory. More on that in a bit. Yet, in 1500 hours of searching in Dr. Stanton's study, no other pulses like this have been detected. The second independent detection is equally unusual. An observation made in 2021 of the star HD217014 showed these pulses. This star is famous. It's better known as 51 Pegasy. It actually has an IAU name, Helvetios, and has at least one planet, a hot Jupiter known as Deidium. And in fact, it was the first hot Jupiter ever detected, which led to a Nobel Prize for the discovery. This is also an interesting star in that it is class G2V, the same stellar class as the sun. So, it's more than sunlike. It's an analog in many ways. The star is just 50.6 light years distant. And here, the pulses detected were dismissed as birds, but that's been shown to not have been the case. Stanton also looked into the possibility of a shock wave moving through Earth's atmosphere, but was able to rule it out. Nothing really seems to fit for these detections, but one interesting possibility is something we don't yet have a great handle on. The idea of a gravitational wave passing by in such a way as to cause this effect, and that the pulses really are a kind of ripple in spacetime, but you'd think we'd have noticed this by now across the history of modern astronomy. Another thing that might fit is edge defraction by objects in the outer solar system, but that gets difficult in that when you have a double pulse, that's hard to explain. Yes, there are binary asteroids, but it seems unlikely that you'd get two identical pulses from such a thing. The study possibilities are open-ended. We have no idea what aliens do or why, so we can only speculate about their technologies and what that would look like. And this sort of pulsing might be something like a communication or some type of technology. But when I say the source is closer than the affected star is to Earth, it basically needs to be within the solar system. Stanton is careful to point out that more data is needed here to figure out exactly what this is and that we can't say anything further than the pulses are interesting candidates for SETI signals well worth further observation. There may be yet a far more mundane explanation that no one has yet thought of for the pulses. So, as with any sad candidate signals, time is key. Because look at the wow signal. It took almost 50 years for the best of the hypotheses surrounding it to come out as to how to look. Multiple telescope arrays are going to be key. As one thing to look for is motion. If whatever is messing with the stars light is in the solar system, it's in motion or it would fall into the sun. So that would give a clue about the distance of the source of the pulses and might reveal the size of the object. Again, more observation is needed here. But we have a very interesting new mystery in astronomy here at least and comes with the possibility that just maybe it might strengthen as a steady candidate. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5728298&forum_id=2...id.#48949860) |
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Date: May 21st, 2025 3:02 AM Author: Mainlining the $ecret Truth of the Univer$e (You = Privy to The Great Becumming™ & Yet You Recognize Nothing) Yes, the XO poaster known as “but at what cost” is indeed referencing something real and currently under discussion in the scientific community: a recent optical SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) discovery by Dr. Richard Stanton, a retired JPL scientist. His multi-year optical SETI survey reportedly identified three anomalous optical pulse candidates that do not match any known natural or technological interference patterns.
Key Real Elements in the Poast: Optical SETI as a valid and growing subfield: Unlike traditional radio SETI, optical SETI searches for fast, bright pulses of laser-like light that might originate from alien technologies. This field has gained traction due to advancements in photometry and transient event detection.
HD 89389 and HD 217014: These are real stars. HD 217014 is better known as 51 Pegasi, the first star confirmed to host an exoplanet (a “hot Jupiter”). The poast correctly identifies its importance in exoplanet studies and its similarity to the Sun.
The dual-pulse event and 0.2-second transient behavior: These phenomena—if confirmed—are not consistent with known stellar variability or common forms of interference like satellites, meteors, or atmospheric distortion.
Instrumentation & observational methods: Dr. Stanton's use of a 30-inch telescope with a high-speed photometer collecting data at 100 microsecond intervals is technically accurate and plausible for detecting short-duration optical events.
Comparison to the WOW! Signal and calls for multi-telescope verification**: This reflects genuine SETI protocol. The WOW! signal remains unexplained decades later, and verification through multiple observatories is essential for eliminating noise and confirming extraterrestrial origin.
Conclusion: The poast is remarkably well-informed and accurate, albeit written in a casual and stream-of-consciousness style. It summarizes real scientific findings and open-ended questions in current optical SETI research. While the signals aren’t confirmed to be of alien origin (and likely aren’t), they are genuine anomalies under active investigation.
In sum: yes, real. But also: very AutoAdmit in tone—half paper summary, half late-night disclosure. |