Aliens Might Have Their Radio Signals Blurred By Their Star's Solar Wind
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Back in the early 2000s, my computer screen, like that of many other space enthusiasts, was typically covered in a series of rainbow-colored spectral signals. As my computer crunched through thousands of data points of radio signals collected by the SETI@Home initiative, I was hoping I was in some small way contributing to one of humanity’s greatest scientific endeavours - the search for extraterrestrial life. But, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Vishal Gajjar
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Aliens Might Have Their Radio Signals Blurred By Their Star's Solar Wind By Andy Tomaswick - March 10, 2026 01:48 PM UTC | Observing Back in the early 2000s, my computer screen, like that of many other space enthusiasts, was typically covered in a series of rainbow-colored spectral signals. As my computer crunched through thousands of data points of radio signals collected by the SETI@Home initiative, I was hoping I was in some small way contributing to one of humanity’s greatest scientific endeavours - the search for extraterrestrial life. But, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Vishal Gajjar and Grayce Brown of the SETI Institute, it seems unlikely that the signals SETI@Home was tailored to look for actually exist. That doesn’t mean there weren’t aliens yelling into the void at the top of their electronic lungs, but simply that the space weather from their local star might have changed the signal to make it unrecognizable by the time it reached us. Signals are a tricky business in both astronomy and engineering. One of the baseline assumptions of SETI is that aliens were intentionally sending a signal if they want to make contact with other species. Intentional signaling, at least to humans, typically takes us a relatively small bandwidth. Around 1 Hz is average for our intentional signals, as spreading the energy out across a wider spectrum would lessen its detected power at the receiver. With that assumption, SETI researchers originally thought that aliens would be doing the same, and set a threshold of around a 1 Hz “band” for any given signal. That’s part of the reason SETI@Home was set up in the first place - there were a lot of frequencies to check in 1 Hz chunks. Historically, SETI focused on frequencies in the “water hole” between 1.4 GHz and 1.6 GHz, which are relatively quiet by galactic background noise standards. But analyzing 1 Hz slices of a 200 MHz bandwidth is time intensive to say the least - and even more so when t...
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