The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute could not locate any alien megastructure during analysis of data from the Kepler Telescope.
SETI Institute researchers examined a star system called KIC 8462852, which they dubbed "Tabby's Star." With the Allen Telescope Array, which consists of 42 six-meter antennas, the researchers found "no clear evidence" of an alien megastructure, the SETI Institute stated in a blog post.
The researchers were scanning for two types of signals: narrow- and broad-band. A Narrow-band signal would an alien population emitting a radio transmission in order to be noticed, whereas broad-band signal would be a bit more of a random transmission.
"The history of astronomy tells us that every time we thought we had found a phenomenon due to the activities of extraterrestrials, we were wrong," SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak said in the blog post. "But although it's quite likely that this star's strange behavior is due to nature, not aliens, it's only prudent to check such things out."
But the failed attempt is not a final strikeout, as astronomers with the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia plan to launch the largest search for extra terrestrial to date next year by scanning up to 1.5 million frequencies at once.
"The [Allen Telescope Array] results do not change our plans at Green Bank," Jason Wright, one of the astronomers, told Popular Science. "The Green Bank telescope is thousands of times more powerful than the ATA, so it will be able to make much more sensitive measurements than the ATA can."
