Why We Might Be Missing Alien Signals

📡 SETI's missing alien signals

🛰️ NASA's exoplanet mission images

🌌 Magnetar birth confirmed

☄️ Evidence of planets colliding

💥 NASA finds star crash site

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute researchers investigated how turbulent plasma winds from distant stars could significantly obscure or broaden potential extraterrestrial radio signals, making them harder for us to detect.

The team's model shows stellar plasma turbulence can smear a sharp, narrowband transmission, spreading its power across a wider frequency range and weakening its peak signal strength, especially around active M-dwarf stars.

This research implies that traditional searches optimized for narrow signals might be missing broadened transmissions, potentially explaining, according to Dr. Vishal Gajjar, some of the observed radio silence in the galaxy.

Arizona State University leads the SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) mission, a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) spacecraft designed to study the energetic activity of low-mass stars and their exoplanets.

The CubeSat uses high-sensitivity UV imagers with specially developed UV-sensitive "delta-doped" detectors to simultaneously monitor far-ultraviolet and near-ultraviolet radiation from M-dwarf stars for extended periods of 5 to 45 days.

These observations will clarify how stellar flares impact exoplanet atmospheres, helping future missions like the Habitable Worlds Observatory assess which distant worlds, according to principal investigator Evgenya Shkolnik, might be habitable.

UC Berkeley and Las Cumbres Observatory astronomers analyzed supernova SN 2024afav, confirming a theory that highly magnetized, spinning neutron stars called magnetars power some of the universe's brightest stellar explosions.

The team observed four oscillating bumps in the supernova's decaying light curve over 200 days, a "chirp" explained by the Lense-Thirring precession of a misaligned accretion disk wobbling around the newly formed magnetar.

This provides the first direct evidence of a magnetar forming from a core-collapse supernova, a "smoking gun" that confirms a key power source for superluminous supernovae, according to astronomer Andy Howell.

University of Washington astronomers led by Anastasios Tzanidakis analyzed archival data from the star Gaia20ehk, uncovering compelling evidence of a catastrophic collision between two large planets orbiting the distant star.

The star, 11,000 light-years away, exhibited chaotic dimming in visible light while simultaneously showing a dramatic spike in infrared light, indicating a massive, hot cloud of debris from a recent planetary impact.

Observing such an impact helps determine the frequency of Earth-moon formation events, which senior author James Davenport says is a fundamental question for understanding the prevalence of habitable worlds in our galaxy.

Penn State University scientists led a multi-mission NASA effort to study the explosive collision of two ultradense neutron stars in a previously unseen type of cosmic environment.

The Fermi telescope detected gamma-ray burst GRB 230906A, which the Chandra and Hubble telescopes then localized to a tiny galaxy embedded within a 600,000 light-year-long intergalactic gas stream.

This "game changing" discovery, according to lead author Simone Dichiara, could explain why some gamma-ray bursts lack host galaxies and how heavy elements like gold are seeded in galactic outskirts.