Ajoint investigation between scientists from the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute and METI International resulted in the discovery of exactly zero radio transmissions emanating from KIC 8462852, aka Tabby’s Star, aka that “alien megastructures” star everyone freaked out about late last year. According to new findings published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, we still haven’t found signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Our cold streak continues.

In case you don’t remember, there was a big hooplah last fall when Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University, dropped a small suggestion that strange stellar light patterns glowing from Tabby’s Star, nearly 1,500 light-years away from Earth, were caused by “alien megastructures,” a catchall phrase for materials artificially placed in orbit. Since then, study after study has basically put that hypothesis to rest, with more reasonable ideas like a family of weird cometsgarnering more and more support based on new data.

But science is about making confirmations, so the dutiful scientists at the SETI Institute and METI international came together and used the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory in Panama to determine whether or not the strange dimming patterns were caused by intelligent extraterrestrials, as well as use the Allen Telescope Array in California to measure whether the star system was spewing out any radio signals indicative of advanced technology.

“We were looking to see if there are intentional laser signals being beamed at us,” says METI International research and study coauthor Douglas Vakoch. He tells Inverse he and his colleagues were looking for the kinds of signs of technology that us humans on Earth might be capable of building and using to broadcast our presence to the rest of the universe.

Unfortunately, they did not find any radio signals, and the optical signals found were less than encouraging. No optical signal of a particular period pattern was measured, and the power of the light pulsing from Tabby’s Star didn’t seem characteristic of a laser signal. “If there is a large laser facility kicking out signals of 5 mega-joules or stronger, we would have been able to detect those,” says Vakoch. “We didn’t.”

Vakoch emphasizes that the results don’t totally discount alien life living in the star system. He and his team were using Boquete during Panama’s rainy season — “the worst possible time,” he says. He acknowledges that the results “don’t say for sure there aren’t extraterrestrials out there.” It’s always possible E.T. is sending weaker signals out or exhibiting patterns stretching across a larger timeframe.

“But we can say that within the scenario where we could have possibly gotten a signal, we didn’t get one,” says Vakoch.

Disheartening, sure, but there’s a strong silver lining to the new findings. While SETI research around the world centers in large part around the measure of radio signals, the new investigation allowed the scientists to flex their optics muscles and get practice at looking for signs of E.T. across other frequencies as well. “If we get a signal, there may be different sources of information at different frequencies, so we need to be ready to jump on that,” said Vakoch.

Moreover, the study demonstrated the feasibility of using even a modest-sized optical telescope to conduct SETI observations. This runs counter to the whole “bigger is better” mentality that permeates space science, and Vakoch thinks the new methodological approaches he and his colleagues outline in their paper illustrate a new model for doing SETI research that is more efficient and sustainable. He says a major goal of METI International, after all, is to answer “how do we sustain the search going forward” as funding for these types of projects drop or become thinned out over more and more initiatives.

“We still don’t have a natural explanation for what is going on” with Tabby’s Star, says Vakoch. And he doesn’t find that particularly discouraging. “This is the type of ambiguity we can expect if we really got a signal from E.T. It will be a slow unfolding and grappling of the data. So we continue to search for answers.”

Protoplanetary disks are celestial bodies found around young stars, which will eventually be sculpted into round spherical as we know them. They’re the subjects of the European Southern Observatory’s Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument, which has been somewhat forcibly maneuvered into the acronym SPHERE. On Wednesday, the ESO released new images and data, captured by three teams of astronomers using SPHERE, of what those young solar systems look like in action.

SPHERE’s cutting-edge precision is able to deliver the kind of detail we need in order to better understand the evolutionary processes of these nascent stars and planets. It has adaptive optics that compensate for visual distortion and a coronagraph that keeps the light from the central star from blowing out the rest of the image. It can also isolate light coming from the star and separate it from the features forming in the disk to make for a more accurate reading.

SPHERE’s first observation, or “first light,” was in June 2014. It uses direct imaging— basically, taking highly detailed pictures of the exoplanets scientists have their eye on. Getting usable direct imaging data from protoplanetary disks is no small feat (though it’s not easy to capture regular planets either).

Concentric rings on the disk around the star RX J1615.

Protoplanetary disks aren’t actually solid — the term refers to expansive clouds of stellar gas and dust that compact into planets over time. But the specifics of that process, including how some planets end up with rings or arms, still aren’t known to us. A SPHERE team hailing from the Netherlands obtained images of rings already forming in an especially young disk — a rare and valuable set of data. Observation of a second symmetrical system soon followed, which is important because prior to this we were mostly finding disks with asymmetrical features — this might mean there are more of the former out there than we thought.

Arm-like spiral structures on the disk around star HD 135344B.

The teams also observed cool phenomena like a “large central cavity and two prominent spiral arm-like structures,” which should eventually develop into something resembling Jupiter. They were also lucky enough to capture images of four separate dark streaks — shadows of young planetary material — one of which changed in shape between observations, meaning SPHERE is getting the data of it dynamically evolving in real time. The takeaway from all of this is basically that protoplanetary spheres are full of surprises — tantalizing, immensely rich fields of study that we now have the technology to better explore.

Photos via European Southern Observatory, J. de Boer et al., European Southern Observatory, T. Stolker et al., European Space Organization

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