A New WOW! Signal?

 

A few months ago I reported on a rather strange pair of videos by Prof. Simon Holland, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/04/seti-success.html. I have wondered since then if this would lead anywhere and it has. The good professor has released another duo to follow up his first two; the second has a very clickbaity title, even by his standards: PROOF? - Alien Signal. What surprised me the most, and embarrassed me a bit, was that it was something I had already heard of and even previously covered, but whose significance I hadn't fully understood. I actually added it onto the end of another article on a distantly related subject just as an aside. The two new videos by Holland mostly just recap what was said in those back in April, but then cite an article published in Nature magazine almost three years ago. What happened was that on the 29th of April (not the 1st!) 2019 the Parkes Murriyang Observatory picked up a narrowband signal from the star Proxima Centauri, famous for being the nearest star to the earth, apart from the sun of course. It was christened Breakthrough Listen Candidate One, BCL1. This was excitedly listed as a "technosignature", possibly generated by an artificial radio source. You can see it clearly as a solid yellow line standing out from the background noise in the waterfall graph illustrated above, and in the source document. This was not done with the drama of a Hollywood movie like Contact; it was all very calm and low-key. The astronomical team went about learning more and more about this strange transmission. It took over a year. They had to control for the usual interference problems generated by our own planet and eliminate natural phenomena that can create radio signals like stellar flares and coronal mass ejections etc. They also had to discern a drift rate from the candidate that was independent of that resulting from the earth's orbit, as explained in Simon's April videos. This revealed that the source was orbiting the star and didn't come directly from the star. This meant that it was probably coming from a planet. It does not, however, correspond to Proxima's known planets, most famously "earth's twin" Proxima b. They also then found that BCL1 was mixed with a number of other similar signals. You may not understand everything in the Nature article and, indeed, I certainly don't; but you don't have to. What is clear is that this is exactly the kind of result the SETI movement has been looking for since its inception in the early 1960's. What more can be learned? The article makes some suggestions including new computer technology to perform data analysis and more joint observations using numerous separate observatories. So far this has not been big mainstream news; and that might be because of an unhappy realization I have come to myself, along with others, that most people are not terribly curious and take very little interest of what lies beyond page one. Who controls what goes onto page one? The media moguls of course; and until they decide to publicize this story it ain't gonna be a story. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd-fefwZQRQ and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WdJQShSLoI. See here for the nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01508-8 and my own contemporary reference: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/02/pentagon-foia-on-debris.html.
 
What I don't get is the sensationalism with which Holland raised the subject in April. He was acting all furtively, talking about a secret insider he called "the source of the information" and making out he was a whistleblower of some kind. He also reckoned that there might be "pictures" in the transmission. Well, the Nature article says nothing that extreme at all. Or does his insider know something that was not published? In that case it brings me back to my previous question: how can something like that be suppressed in a worldwide network of astronomy teams? As I've said before, the conspiracy would be too top-heavy. Astronomy is the world's only truly democratic science and nothing can be covered up in it. Hopefully we'll learn more soon. However, from even the distance of the nearest star, our perception is limited by distance. Hopefully the new methods will work. Prof. Holland is doing a Q and A livestream soon. I'll be sure to watch and, if necessary, report back to you.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/12/ben-emlyn-jones-at-awakecon-2017.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-coxxer-goes-pro-alien.html.