SETI finds unexplained signals from distant stars

SETI is an organization founded by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake dedicated to the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Yes, scientists are looking for intelligence, not just life, whether it be bacteria, bugs, or anything else that lives outside of Earth, but also, if possible, beings with the technological capacity to communicate with us.

There is some controversy about this because some scientists say that it could be a very bad idea. For example, Stephen Hawking said that it could be a very bad idea because those intelligent beings could be more developed than us and could conclude that we are a potential threat to them. It would all depend on whether they have the capacity to make interstellar travel or not; that would be the basic question.

At the moment, SETI is searching for extraterrestrial life and is doing so without attracting attention, that is, it is trying to pick up fossil radio signals that may have been emitted by another extraterrestrial civilization a long time ago or other types of optical signals such as this one in particular, which could fall within the concept of an “artificial” signal because we do not know what it is right now.

Specifically, this has led to the discovery of these signals, which, incidentally, have now been published with a date of August 2025, although the publication was actually made just two or three days ago, when it was announced, and its official publication will be in August, when it will be made public, but the information and research data have been compiled.

This type of signal has a long history because it began with the Ozma project, which was actually the first attempt prior to SETI to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in a systematic and scientific manner. It was carried out in 1960 by astronomer Frank Drake, who, among other things, is the creator of the Drake equation. This astronomer began working with the Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory, studying nearby stars similar to the sun, specifically Epsilon Eridiane, which is 10.4 light-years away, and Tau Ceti, which is 11.9 light-years away.

Since then, multiple studies have been conducted at different wavelengths to search for signs of technological activity or techno-signatures. Unfortunately, nothing has been found yet, but here we come to the information that was published in Acta Astronautica. In that research, veteran NASA scientist Richard H. Stanton describes the results of a multi-year SETI study analyzing 13 stars similar to the Sun, (this detail is important) to obtain not radio signals, which is another search they do separately, but optical signals. According to this study, two identical fast pulses have been discovered from a star called HD 89389, a star that is similar to the Sun and relatively close, about 100 light-years away in the direction of the Big Dipper.

These pulses coincide with those of another star observed four years ago. The researcher detected this signal on May 14, 2023, and according to his article, the signal consisted of two rapid, identical pulses separated by 4.4 seconds that had not been detected in previous searches. The researcher then compared these signals with signals produced by airplanes, satellites, meteors, lightning, or anything else because it is necessary to eliminate any possibility of noise contamination that could have infected or damaged that signal.

In the end when you eliminate all that, you are left with the clean data of that signal and in the end it turns out that the signal did not correspond to any of that other thing, it was a signal that came from that star and that turned out to be very strange, because the star first became weaker, brighter and then returned to its normal level, all in approximately 0.2 seconds, that variation is too intense to be caused by random noise, atmospheric turbulence or any other phenomenon.

The researcher actually asked himself textually “how can a star more than a million kilometers in diameter be made to partially disappear in a tenth of a second”, the second issue is that the three previous events were observed two practically identical pulses separated between 1.2 and 4.4 seconds. And then there was another third event, but this one is not yet fully analyzed, an event from January 18, 2025.

There is another issue that also concerns the researcher: no movement was detected near the star or in the background sensor, which are common signals sometimes caused by asteroids or meteorites. This is because, apart from ruling out possible terrestrial sources, such as an airplane, among others, or a space satellite, they also ruled out possible sources that may have passed by, because it could perfectly well have been an asteroid from our solar system that had passed in front of the star at that very moment, producing a kind of eclipse. They determined that it was not that type of signal either.

Researcher Stanton has done a tremendous job, conducting an incredible and exhaustive analysis to eliminate everything possible, sweeping away everything that could be “chaff” and finding this needle in this haystack. He said, verbatim, "none of these explanations is really satisfactory at this point; we don't know what kind of object could produce these pulses, nor how far away it is. We don't know if the two-pulse signal is produced by something passing between us and the star or if it is generated by something that modulates the star's light without moving across the field. Until we know more, we can't even say for sure if extraterrestrials are involved," says the researcher.

Visual signals are also a possible source of communication between stars, not just radio signals, which obviously also travel at the speed of light, but they are also a source of communication and something that SETI is also studying.

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