An international team of researchers recently announced the detection of a strong radio signal from the direction of the stellar system, HD 164595. The detection was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope which is located in Zelenchukskaya region of Karachay-Cherkess Republic of Russia.
HD 164595 is solar system located 95 light years away in deep space. It is a few billion years older than the Sun but is similar in size and brightness. This system is known to have one planet of the size of Neptune. Since, the planet is situated in a very tight orbit, it is not considered hospitable to life. However, there are many other planets in HD 164595 that are still undiscovered.
There are a few questions that need to be addressed before deriving any conclusions, of course.
“First, is the detected signal really coming from the direction of HD 164595? The patch from which the signal seems to be coming agrees in the east-west direction (the narrow part of the beam) with HD 164595’s sky coordinates, so that’s the basis of the assumption by the discoverers that this is likely to be coming from that star system. But of course, that’s not necessarily the case,” posted Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI institute.
“Second is the question of the characteristics of the signal itself. The strength of the signal was 0.75 Janskys, or in common parlance, “weak.” But was it weak only because of the distance of HD 164595? Perhaps it was weak because of “dilution” of the signal by the very wide bandwidth of the Russian receiver?” he added.
Despite all these questions, the Russian Academy of Science on August 30 said in a statement that the signals received by the RATAN-600 telescope are mostly likely to be of terrestrial origins.
This certainly is worth further studies. Hence, it only makes sense for RATAN-600 researchers to call for permanent monitoring of this target. There are quite a few plausible explanations that need to be discovered in full length. But until then, as Seth Shostak said, we can only says it’s ‘interesting.’
