The aliens aren’t coming. Yet

What happens when a mysterious radio signal from a star system 95 light years away encounters the overactive imagination of netizens? Enormous hype, for sure, accompanied by speculation that ET would arrive on earth in time to don a party hat and ring in the New Year.

To be fair, the Internet isn’t entirely to blame. TheObserver ran a story about the development with the clickbait title “Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space”. Besides reporting that the radio signal in question was initially detected by Russian astronomers in May 2015 but was kept a secret from the international community, the story went on to discuss the nature of the alien civilisation that emitted the signal.

Unfortunately, those pesky scientists, who have a proclivity for ruining a good story by doing their job, had to remind the Internet not to get ahead of itself. While it is true that astronomers working with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, focused the Allen Telescope Array towards the star system in the hope of finding the origin of the signal, they downplayed the possibility that it could be from an alien civilisation.

Eric Korpela, who works with SETI, wrote that the signal could be a result of cosmic events like “stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source”, or just a “satellite passing through the telescope field of view”. Unless the signal could be detected again, Korpela concluded, “it’s relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint”.

Fortunately, some took the disappointing news in good humour.