London, July 17: To the delight of those trying to find life beyond our solar system, a team of astronomers has claimed to have picked up “strange sigls” emating from a star 11 light years away. The sigls were detected by researchers from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico who are studying red dwarf stars.
On May 12 this year, the team observed mysterious radio sigls emating from a star called “Ross 128”. “We realised that there were some very peculiar sigls in the 10-minute dymic spectrum that we obtained from ‘Ross 128’ (GJ 447), observed May 12,” wrote professor Abel Mendez, planetary astrobiologist and director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico in a blog post. “In case you are wondering, the recurrent aliens hypothesis is at the bottom of many other better explations,” Mendez added. However, the source of the mysterious sigls still eludes the team.
“We do not know the origin of these sigls but there are three main possible explations: they could be emissions from ‘Ross 128’ similar to Type II solar flares, emissions from another object in the field of view of ‘Ross 128’, or just burst from a high orbit satellite since low orbit satellites are quick to move out of the field of view,” Mendez added. The sigls are probably too dim for other radio telescopes in the world and are currently under calibration. “Therefore, we have a mystery here and the three main explations are as good as any at this moment,” the professor said. Dwarf stars have been shown to have planets orbiting the habitable, or ‘goldilocks,’ zone, as is the case with the recently discovered TRAPPIST-1, RT reported. (IANS)