The time 234 stars tried to get our attention
In 2016, astronomer Ermanno Borra from Laval University in Quebec, along with graduate student Eric Trottier, were exploring the possibility that advanced aliens might want to contact us with powerful directed lasers. To that end, the duo searched through 2.5 million stars recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in hopes of finding distinct periodic spectral signatures consistent with such a technological feat. Of these, Borra and Trottier found 234 candidates, all emanating from very Sun-like stars. After ruling out several possibilities, the authors settled on two possible outcomes: Either these signals are an artifact from the Sloan instrument, or, ahem, aliens.
A follow-up letter written by researchers from the Breakthrough Listen initiative said the “one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study,” but “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations.”
