... It could be an astrophysical MASER . I looked for information on any spectral lines a MASER might produce at or near 982 MHz, but found none. Perhaps a previously unobserved spectral line, from a substance not heretofore known to be a MASER medium. That seems a longshot, though. Have you any thoughts on what the MASER medium could be, in this case?

The only connection I see with any spectral line is the following curious fact: The frequency of the Proxima Centauri signal ( 982.002 MHZ ) is *very* nearly three times the deuterium spectral line at 327.384 MHz. This could be a coincidence. of course, but the fit is remarkably close. This looks to me more like the logic of a SETI 'magic frequency' than a natural phenomenon.

A harmonic of the deuterium spectral line is an interesting idea.

An alternate and very wild idea is that we have stumbled across a (strangely powerful?) radio recombination line emission for the planet or some surrounding gas or orbital gas cloud. Or for interaction with the planet and flare itself? Note that RRLs are emissive above a few 100 MHz:

(pdf) The first detection of radio recombination lines at cosmological distances

And there's a lot of material to play with! (List of interstellar and circumstellar molecules)


With only the minimal 'teaser' data, we can only play wild guesses until they release the details of their studies.

A Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster for the best guess?! ;-)


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

The He n-Alpha line (Hel 188A) at 982.2399 MHz looks the most likely. Given the great multitude of radio recombination lines that have been inferred, it seems that the radio spectrum would almost be saturated with these, if most of them were actually emitting .

I'm struck by the way the signal apparently rose in frequency consistently, for several days, as it was repeatedly observed. The signal has been ascribed by some to an unidentified example of our own technology. I doubt this, though. If the frequency rise is attributable to a Doppler shift, it doesn't resemble one from one of our own aircraft or satellites, not with so long and consistent a motion of approach.

It does look like a Doppler shift caused by a rather slow-rotating planet, or by the motion of a planet around its star.

Signal detected: Are we alone in the endless abyss of space?
If aliens are sending us signals, are we set up to detect them?
W5's Dan Riskin speaks with Dan Wertheimer, Seth Shostak and other planetary scientists, radio astronomers, and computer scientists who explain how the search for ET has ramped up in the last few decades.
But if they're successful, is there a way to predict what alien creatures might look like?
There's also a few references to SETI@home.

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https://scitechdaily.com/a-mysterious-signal-looked-like-a-sign-of-alien-technology-heres-what-the-investigation-revealed/

A Mysterious Signal Looked Like a Sign of Alien Technology – Here’s What the Investigation Revealed


In December last year, the media reported an intriguing signal we at the Breakthrough Listen project found in our radio telescope data. Dubbed BLC1, the signal didn’t appear to be the result of any recognizable astrophysical activity or any familiar Earth-based interference.

The trouble was, we weren’t ready to discuss it. When you’re searching for signs of extraterrestrial life, you want to be very careful about getting it right before you make any announcements. Last year we had only just started secondary verification tests, and there were too many unanswered questions.

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follow up to a signal?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-are-finally-coming-into-focus/
Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Are Finally Coming into Focus

Nobody noticed when an Australian radio telescope captured a fleeting explosion of light coming from somewhere far beyond the Milky Way in 2001. Records of the powerful flare-up—which produced as much energy in a few thousandths of a second as the sun does in a day—sat unseen for more than half a decade until a group of scientists sifting through archival data spotted the stupendous eruption—a so-called fast radio burst (FRB).

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Thank you, Lynn, for sharing that very good article on FRBs from Scientific American. It seems possible that an artificial signal could resemble one from a astrophysical source, like a highly magnetized pulsar, or magnetar, given a sufficiently advanced civilization.

These are still very early days for us, where Fast Radio Bursts are concerned. FRBs are said to have a great deal of complex structure within the signal band. I hope that this structure can eventually be analyzed, in case it might contain some intelligent modulation.

Such analysis would be particularly valuable where an astrophysical source seems less likely, such as in area of space where young, violent stars, which are believed to give rise to natural FRBs, are not thought to exist.

Is it within the realm of possibility that seti@home will start up again in some manner like it was before? I liked the idea that maybe a work unit that I helped analyze would turn out to be the one everyone is waiting for. Even though I know the possibility was always very slim. It's like winning the lottery, no matter how slim the odds are you know you can't win if you don't buy a lottery ticket. With seti if you quit looking it's a sure bet you won't find ET because ET isn't going to come looking for us.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Quite a while with no response to my inquiry. So I am guessing that SETI at HOME is dead, at least in the form that I originally signed up for. Too bad, for a while there I actually believed I was making a contribution to the cause.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Quite a while with no response to my inquiry. So I am guessing that SETI at HOME is dead, at least in the form that I originally signed up for. Too bad, for a while there I actually believed I was making a contribution to the cause.

Sadly, I believe that SETI@home is done and dusted. I hope that I am wrong and that in some way, this project would resume.

A recent post by Eric Korpela shows some of SETI's servers being scrapped "We cleaned out the lab. That meant sending the Sun Enterprise series servers that handled SETI@home's databases and web traffic down to the university's Excess and Salvage department. Here they are sitting in the hallway waiting to go."?
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870#2096776

Personally, I am a bit gutted. It was a great project, with a wonderful community, that I had hoped would one day be fully funded and help us finally discover evidence of E.T.?

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Bambi Hunters. Hunting Bambi's before they hunt us!

So, the attitude by the mainstream scientific world remains the same as depicted in the movie CONTACT. We are a bunch of fringe living weirdos wasting resources looking for something or someone that isn't there.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Stumbled across this while looking for something else.

Why scientists can’t give up the hunt for alien life
There will always be "wolf-criers" whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

• All throughout human history, we've gazed up at the stars and wondered if we're truly alone in the Universe, or if other life — possibly even intelligent life — is out there for us to find. 
  
  
• Although there have been many who claim that aliens exist and that we've already contacted them, those claims have all withered under scrutiny, with their claimants having cried "wolf" with insufficient evidence. 
  
  
• Nevertheless, the scientific case remains extremely compelling for suspecting that life, and possibly even intelligent life, is out there somewhere.
  
  Here's why we must keep looking...

It's perfectly possible that some alleged contacts with extraterrestrials could be real. The witnesses may have been contacted in ways that precluded the gathering of convincing evidence. This could even happen by design.

Extraterrestrials could have noticed our progress in space travel, and our aggressive tendencies. They might take a very long view of this, by our standards. They may wish to avoid having our eventual contact with other intelligent life in the galaxy occur haphazardly, with unfortunate consequences. They could have adopted a very gradual program of our preparation for galactic citizenship.

Much of the UFO phenomenon could be the outward signs of a deliberately ambiguous, slowly evolving, and largely deniable (by us) effort in this direction.

I am very doubtful that we can scientifically study technically superior extraterrestrials in a satisfactory or conclusive way. Not as long as they are studying us and don't want that fact to be too quickly, and disruptively grasped.

SETI made it into this week's ElReg's SysAdmin Who Me???
Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry
No good deed escapes scripting SNAFUs

Alf's time at the bank coincided with the launch of SETI@home...

SETI: How AI-boosted satellites, robots could help search for life on other planets
Software scans to give rovers a clue

A large team of researchers led by the SETI Institute believe AI algorithms can be trained to detect these biosignatures by analyzing surface maps obtained from spacecraft orbiting a planet. Rovers equipped with the computer vision software could then be sent to look for these signals of extraterrestrial life.

SETI@home gets a mention in this PC Gamer article
Do you turn your PC off at night?

By Andy Chalk, news writer

I never turn my PC off. It's a habit I got into years ago when I was running a local BBS, and at some point I heard the story about turning a PC on and off being harder on the components than letting it run full time, which made it easier to justify leaving it on (and is also probably nonsense). I've also been running Seti@home/Boinc for just about forever and I would hate to disappoint my fellow researchers at Berkeley by slacking off.

Never mind SETI and NASA, if your Ring somehow snaps ET, Amazon might give you $1M

Amazon is back with a cheeky way to normalize the privacy conundrum that are Ring doorbell cameras - a $1 million prize for anyone able snap "scientific evidence" of extraterrestrials using one of its porch cams.

The Ring Million Dollar Sighting publicity stunt, er, contest is open between now and November, and Amazon has even managed to land an "extraterrestrial expert" in the form of meteorologist and astrobiologist Dr Jacob Haqq Misra of Blue Marble Space to judge the competition.

Harvard SETI Project Helps ID Mystery Sound

Last month, thousands of people in New Hampshire took to social media to report an explosion in the sky that was strong enough to rattle windows. Naturally aliens were blamed by some, while cooler heads theorized it may have been a sonic boom from a military aircraft. But without any evidence, who could say?

Luckily for concerned residents, this was precisely the sort of event Harvard’s Galileo Project was designed to investigate. Officially described as a way to search for “technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs)”, the project keeps a constant watch on the sky with a collection of cameras and microphones. With their gear, the team was able to back up the anecdotal reports with with hard data.
...
As it turns out, the Orionid meteor shower was just about at its peak in the skies over Massachusetts at that point. Given the average velocity of these particular meteors (66 km/s), [Avi] figures the source of the sound was a space rock of about a meter in diameter meeting its fiery end.

Researchers start first low frequency search for alien technology in distant galaxies

The SETI Institute, the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research announced a study using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia. Led by Dr. Chenoa Tremblay of the SETI Institute and Prof. Steven Tingay of Curtin University, this research is the first to search for signs of alien technology in galaxies beyond our own, focusing on low radio frequencies (100 MHz).

This innovative study used the MWA's large field of view (FOV), allowing the team to cover about 2,800 galaxies in one observation, of which 1,300 we know the distance to. Usually, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has focused on signals within our galaxy. This new approach goes further, looking at distant galaxies.

This new approach looks at distant galaxies, making it one of the most detailed searches for super civilizations—those more advanced than ours. To send a signal from another galaxy, a civilization would need technology powerful enough to use the energy of their sun or several stars in their galaxy.

The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.