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Did This Russian Space Telescope Just Detect Signs of Alien Life?

RATAN-600 received a very strong radio signal from distant star HD 164595, about 95 light-years from Earth. Was it aliens? Look, probably not. But still...
Russian radio telescope Ratan-600. Photo via Flickr user Konstantin Malanchev

On the outskirts of the Russian mountain village of Zelenchukskaya, there is a radio telescope called RATAN-600, which is designed for a very specific purpose—to detect signs of extraterrestrial life.

Last year, the telescope received a very strong radio signal from distant star HD 164595, about 95 light-years from Earth. The Russian scientists in charge of RATAN-600 have kept pretty quiet about the discovery; however, the news has been enough to pique the interest of some in the scientific community.

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At the forefront are researchers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute—a nonprofit dedicated to scientific investigations of possible extraterrestrial life. SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak addressed the recently revealed finding in a blog post, saying the detected signal was about 2.7 cm in wavelength and 11 GHz in frequency—not too different from a digital TV signal.

While it's far too early to know what this signal means, or what's generating it, there are now calls for it to be permanently monitored.

If the signal is real, it would have to be extremely powerful in order to reach Earth from the distant HD 164595 star. Shostak says it would require about 50 trillion watts of power—more power than everybody on Earth is using at any given moment.

On August 28, SETI scientists directed their own set of powerful telescopes, the Allen Telescope Array, at HD 164595 in hope of finding a signal similar to what the RATAN-600 detected last May. As yet, the institute hasn't had any luck yet. However, in his blogpost Shostak noted that "we have not yet covered the full range of frequencies in which the signal could be located..A detection, of course, would immediately spur the SETI and radio astronomy communities to do more follow-up observations."

HD 164595 is known to have at least one planet in its orbit. Some scientists have even called it "sun-like," a description that makes the possibility of the signal indicating the presence of extraterrestrial life on an orbiting planet even more tantalising.

But Shostak isn't terribly optimistic about the chances of finding the signal again, or of it indicating alien life in the first place. Still, he's keen to learn more.

"The chance that this is truly a signal from extraterrestrials is not terribly promising, and the discoverers themselves apparently doubt that they've found ET. Nonetheless, one should check out all reasonable possibilities, given the importance of the subject," he writes.

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