The poet T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, but he clearly never spent a winter in the Kawarthas. It’s merciless out there.
If you like looking at the night sky, though, February is also a month of long nights with steady atmosphere and stars bright and clear as chips of glass. If you have the woolens for it, there are winter gems aplenty: the Pleiades, Hyades, and Beehive star clusters; the great nebula in Orion; a full moon on the 27th; and Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky, blazing on the brow of Medd’s Mountain in the early evening.
In this month’s Stargazing column, though, we’re looking—actually, listening—to a spot in the sky much farther south. So far south, in fact, that you’ll never see it unless you take your binoculars to Australia or Florida in early May. That’s the Alpha Centauri system, and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun.
We’re listening in that direction because on December 18 it was leaked to The Guardian that the Parkes Radio Observatory, in New South Wales, Australia, had picked up a strong radio signal apparently emanating from the direction of Proxima Centauri. The signal has several of the attributes expected to accompany an intercepted transmission from an alien civilization, or what’s known as a “technosignature.” It’s narrow-band, for one thing, which implies technology because natural radio emissions from deep space tend to smear out over a broad range of frequencies. This one is a sharp spike at 982.02 megahertz, which is also very near the so-called “water hole,” or the naturally quiet gap in the radio spectrum that an alien civilization would probably use, if it wanted to be heard across deep space. The signal also vanished when the telescope was turned away slightly, a process called “nodding” that helps identify terrestrial interference. If the same signals are picked up in both positions, then it’s probably nearby radio noise; if it appears in only one direction, then maybe you’ve got something.
And maybe we do, finally. We’ve been waiting a long time for that cosmic pin-drop that says we’re not alone in the universe. But we’ve been fooled many times, too, and I wouldn’t put much money on ET riding a bicycle over Medd’s Mountain any time soon. Almost every candidate signal received to date has turned out to be satellites, natural phenomena, stray space junk, a statistical error, a microwave oven in one case, or some other disappointingly human and humdrum artifact. It’s a gigantic red flag, for example, that the signal’s frequency, measured in cycles per second, lies so close to an integer value. Aliens probably divide time into something different from human seconds.
Still, there is the famous “Wow!” signal of 1977, a 72-second radio burst that remains unexplained. And there is Oumuamua, a strangely elongated interstellar object, the first known visitor from outside the solar system, that whipped past the Earth at incredible speed late in 2017. Am I suggesting that the 44 years since the Wow! signal is just enough time for an object travelling at Oumuamua’s speed to cover the distance to Earth from the spot where the Wow! signal may have originated? No, no I am not.
Stories like this need to be met with deep skepticism and great patience. The latest radio candidate for extraterrestrial life will almost certainly turn out to be yet another blob of human radio flotsam. Almost certainly.
In the meantime, it gives one pause to think, and to wonder. Henry David Thoreau, the American naturalist, writer, and philosopher, once said that “nature is our widest home,” but in a way he was wrong; we have another home wider still, albeit less hospitable.
Well, you can doubt all you want, but I personally have seen space creatures walking around Millbrook, many times. You can, too. In spring, after the pond melts, walk down to the water’s edge and lean over. Look down.
Stargazing by Dennis Vanderspek
