Famous astrophysicist: "There is no proof, but anything is possible"
Russian astronomers again, as in the distant 65th year, "found aliens", however, the Americans told the world about it. Some experts in the west hastened to call the outbreak, which was recorded by astrophysicists from the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Nizhny Arkhyz, as a signal from another civilization.
The event that happened more than a year ago turned out to be out of the ordinary, strange, but Russian scientists remained true to themselves - as if inveterate intelligence officers had not spilled a single drop of information to the public, eager for such news.
In the end, not being able to independently deal with the "superflare" caught by their RATAN-600 radio telescope in the direction of the HD164595 star system in the constellation Hercules, they sent information to their Western colleagues for advice. But the Americans did not remain silent and immediately, as recently as last Monday, they spread the sensation all over the world.
The American Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations SETI has already begun to look for brothers in mind in the constellation Hercules. And what about our astronomers? For an objective assessment of what happened, we turned to a Russian expert in the search for extraterrestrial signals, a senior researcher at the State Astrophysical Institute. Sternberg Moscow State University Lomonosov to Lev Gindilis.
First, about what happened on May 15, 2015 in Nizhny Arkhyz.
On this day, the RATAN-600 telescope was aimed at the star HD164595, the vicinity of which is considered a potential abode of an extraterrestrial civilization due to its similarity with our Sun. In practice, this is its analogue, which is located at a distance of 95 light years from Earth.
In 2015, near HD164595, scientists discovered a large exoplanet that is 16 times larger than Earth and orbits the star in 40 days. Is there life there in our usual sense? Hope for its habitability is given by a powerful signal coming from the vicinity of the exoplanet directly in the direction of the Earth at a wavelength of 2.7 centimeters. Many sources emit at this wavelength, but the characteristics of the May signal from Hercules turned out to be more than strange.
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First of all, because it was very confident, clear, comparable in power to the signal from the Moon, and even brighter than it or some famous pulsar by an order of magnitude, which is already a rarity.
Such a signal, according to representatives of SETI, could have generated a supercivilization that mastered the energy of its sun.
According to news agencies, two groups of researchers in the United States have already become interested in the information: one is led by the leading astronomer SETI Seth Shostak, the other is Doug Vakoch, president of the METI program, aimed at establishing communication with aliens, and not just finding them. They are already preparing the ATA telescope (The Allen Telescope Array - a joint project of the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley) and a number of other instruments for observing the star in the constellation Hercules.
The signal opened by the Russians will become one of the main topics for discussion at the annual meeting of the Permanent Council of SETI at the International Astronomical Union, which will be held on September 27 in Guadalajara, Mexico.
- Just don't make a big sensation out of this, - warns Lev Mironovich Gindilis. - The discoverers of the signal from the star decided to attract the attention of the scientific community in order to try to figure out what it is, nothing more. Perhaps this is a signal from another civilization. But there is no evidence of this. Astronomers observed the flash for only two seconds, and it never happened again, although the observations before and after it were very long. By the way, the absence of repetition is a disadvantage when it comes to collecting arguments in favor of a man-made radio signal.
What could it be if you exclude the version about contactees?
- The next step of the specialists was to search for all possible sources of interference that could cause such a signal. A similar intensity of radio emission could have been produced by a flying plane or a space satellite.
This version was tested immediately back in Arkhyz and immediately shallowed, because the signal characteristics did not coincide at all with those that can be obtained from flying terrestrial objects.
Now the task is to find, together with Western colleagues, other explanations for what happened, try to look at this star on other telescopes. Perhaps we simply do not yet know another cosmic source capable of sending such signals.
We passed a similar "lesson" in 1965. We then observed the space radio source STA-102. It had a rather interesting spectrum - it resembled the spectrum of an artificial source, and an idea was expressed: to look at its variability (at that time, natural variable sources were not yet discovered, and therefore, if the source had variability, then it would be considered man-made). And so it turned out that our CTA was indeed variable. Its intensity varied with a period of 102 days (which coincided with its assigned number).
This was the reason for the "sensation": the Western press raised a fuss: "Soviet scientists have discovered an extraterrestrial civilization transmitting an alternating signal!" Then, as if playing with us, STA-102 stopped changing the intensity, and in the west they said: "The Russians were wrong."
In fact, we were not mistaken (about the variability): after a few years, we found that this source "turned on" again. It turned out that he belonged to such a type of natural phenomena as variable radio sources - quasars. Perhaps even now, thanks to an unusual signal from the star HD164595, we will discover a new type of sources that we do not yet know.
Natalia Vedeneeva