Views of recent events on the planet Jupiter

(AFP)
–
5 days ago

https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gEo8oZEZB8foP4-cSlBPpKMaYpcQ

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PARIS — The orbiting Hubble telescope may have explained a mystery
streak of light that occurred on the face of Jupiter on June 3, the
European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday.
Last week Hubble Space Telescope images definitively showed that
the bright flash of light seen on Jupiter was simply a meteor.
Albeit, a blinding bright meteor to be seen across 400 million miles of
interplanetary space. As
reported by Ian O’Neill Hubble failed to find any telltale debris
as seen in Jupiter comet and asteroid impacts.
Now Hubble astronomers tell us that Jupiter super-meteors might be
detectable as frequently every few days. Australian amateur astronomer
Anthony Wesley just
got lucky because he was viewing a video transmission of Jupiter
when the brilliant flash appeared.
This event was sobering to me because my mind invariably wandered to
wondering if a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization might be
just as transient.
SLIDE
SHOW: Top 10 Places to Find Alien Life

Despite
our best search strategies, are signals from E.T. manifested in
anomalous flashes of radio energy from our galaxy that are missed, or
dismissed as natural phenomena? Maybe alien transmissions are popping
off all around us but we just aren’t looking at the right place or right
time to seen them.
In a recently published
paper by James Benford and Dominic Benford of Microwave Sciences in
Lafayette, California, the authors imagine that SETI beacons might be
much like a lighthouse, sweeping the galactic plane in a raster
pattern.  Depending on beam size and scan rate, many days could pass
between the brief Twitter-like bursts of “here we are” flashes from
alien civilizations.
"We should learn how to identify any such beacons," the authors say.
For starters they expect the beam would pulsate to conserve energy and
also have amplitude or frequency modulation of the carrier to draw
attention to itself.
WIDE
ANGLE: Are We Alone?

The problem is that pulsars (powerful bursts of radiation from rotating neutron star
magnetospheres) look just what an alien transmission might look like
according to this SETI "lighthouse" model. In fact when pulsars were
first discovered in the mid 1960’s they were nicknamed “LGMs” for
“Little Green Men.”
There are certain unusual transient phenomena that are likely due to
pulsars behaving, well, unusually. These occasionally repeat,
but others do not. The authors say that we should consider SETI beacons
as a candidate explanation when perplexing non-repeating signals that
are seen in the radio sky.
One example they cite is PSR J1928+15 that was a transient burst of
radio pulses that was observed only for two minutes in 2005 near the
galactic plane -- and never repeated in several dozen subsequent
searches. Three pulses came in succession. The first and third pulse was
down a factor of ten from the powerful central pulse. The source is
estimated to be 26,000 light years away, the distance to the heart of
our galaxy.
The SETI-lighthouse hypothesis would explain PSR J1928+15 as an E.T.
scanning beacon. As it swept past Earth, the giant Arecibo radio
telescope in Puerto Rico caught the central pulse of the true beam. The
first and third pulses were at the edges of the beam width according to
this interpretation.

A far simpler explanation is that the transient was caused by an
asteroid falling into the neutron star from a circumpulsar disk. This
perturbed the pulsar’s intense magnetic field.
If we diligently apply Occam’s
Razor (going with the simplest explanation) the crashing asteroid
solution wins over E.T. saying “Hi.”
Also, the central beam pulse was 190,000 terawatts -- 10,000 times
the total power output of our civilization! I wouldn't want to pay that
electric bill.
Still, this kind of mega-engineering would be cheaper than the ticket
price high-speed interstellar travel. The authors say there might be a
scaling effect where super-civilizations build extraordinarily powerful
transmitters. These aliens might have limitless armies of
self-replicating machines that tirelessly construct vast antenna arrays
orbiting a star and sucking up solar energy.
Another problem is that such civilizations are probably rare in the
galaxy. And, at the same time we need to assume that they’d decide to
stick with radio wavelengths as a viable communications channel for
reaching any entities they would be interested in contacting.
Less ambitious or less advanced civilizations might try beacons too,
but the beams would be weaker, though likely to be more numerous in the
galaxy.
FROM DISCOVERY NEWS>>
The dilemma is that exotic astrophysics theories, no matter how
exotic, would always trump any conclusion that super-aliens where
pumping out extravagantly powerful broadcasts.  Even suggesting “I found
E.T.”  could be a career-killer for any young astronomer.
If such artificially produced flashes are real, they will likely
remain ghosts in the cosmic night that are as fleeting as Jupiter’s
super-meteors.
Artwork Credit: D. Lovlas

Are We Overlooking Alien Beacons?

Analysis by Ray Villard

Mon Jun 21, 2010
https://news.discovery.com/space/do-we-overlook-alien-beacons.html#mkcpgn=emnws1