Stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near a transmitting planet can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute's scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.
This system is truly extraordinary. We're seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Fundamentally, masers and lasers are focused beams of light in the same frequency. In the realm of astrophysics, these can arise from clouds of dust being excited into a higher energy state from the light emitted by other sources, like stars and black holes.
In the balmy late summer of 1924, people across the world prepared to receive the first messages from the intelligent alien civilization that was assumed to inhabit Mars. To tune in to these Martian communications, the U.S. military imposed a period of radio silence on the nation that spanned 36 hours between August 21 and 23, coinciding with an unusually close pass between Mars and Earth in their orbits around the Sun.
