Mysterious Star Pulses May Be Alien Signals, Study Claims
A study published in October 2016 reported the detection of odd light pulses coming from 234 of 2.5 million stars observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico (pictured here). These pulses are consistent with signals that intelligent aliens might produce, the study authors claimed.
Credit: SDSS/Fermilab Visual Media Services/NASA

Strange pulses of cosmic light might be signals from hundreds of different alien civilizations — or just the latest false alarm in the tortuous search for ET.  

This month, astrophysicists Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier, both from Laval University in Quebec, announced that they had spotted mysterious light signals coming from 234 different stars in our Milky Way galaxy. These pulses match the profile of signals that Borra, in a 2012 paper, predicted intelligent aliens might use to get our attention, the authors wrote.

"We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis," the duo wrote in the paper, which was published online Oct. 14 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]