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'Peculiar' radio signals emerge from nearby star
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This artist rendering provided by NASA shows a star being swallowed by a black hole, and emitting an X-ray flare, shown in red, in the process. A new study published Monday, Feb. 6, 2017, in the journal Nature Astronomy details a black hole that's taken a record-breaking decade to devour a star 1.8 billion light-years from Earth. (NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M.Weiss via AP/File)
S
ome very "peculiar signals" have been noticed coming from a star just 11 light-years away, scientists in Puerto Rico say.
The mystery has gripped the internet as speculation mounts about the potential for a discovery of alien life on the red dwarf star known as Ross 128 -- despite the best attempts of astronomers to put such rumors to rest.
"In case you are wondering, the recurrent aliens hypothesis is at the bottom of many other better explanations," said a blog post by Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.
Something unusual first came to light in April and May, when the team was studying a series of small and relatively cool red dwarf stars, some of which are known to have planets circling them.
Ross 128 is not known to have planets, but "we realized that there were some very peculiar signals in the 10-minute dynamic spectrum that we obtained from Ross 128."
The signals were observed May 13 at 0053 GMT, and "consisted of broadband quasi-periodic non-polarized pulses with very strong dispersion-like features," he wrote.
"We believe that the signals are not local radio frequency interferences (RFI) since they are unique to Ross 128 and observations of other stars immediately before and after did not show anything similar."
There are three main possibilities to explain the bursts.
They could be emissions similar to solar flares.
They could be emissions from another object in the field of view of Ross 128.
Or they might be a burst from a high orbit satellite, Mendez wrote.
