Stellar Weather Broadens Narrowband Signals, Challenging SETI's 1 Hz Beacon Assumption

To the point

Researchers argue that signals intended to be narrowly tuned in frequency can be smeared by a star’s solar wind, broadening a 1 Hz beacon to about 10–100 Hz as it travels and making it harder to spot with standard SETI filters; they base this on solar-plasma measurements from interplanetary spacecraft and extrapolate to other stars, noting that closer sources and especially red dwarfs with violent space weather would smear signals more, which could help explain missed detections and suggests future observatories may need advanced processing—such as matched filtering and multi‑resolution channelization—or rainbow spectrograms to recover broadened technosignatures, though how common this is remains uncertain.

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Aliens Might Have Their Radio Signals Blurred By Their Stars Solar Wind
universetoday.com

Aliens Might Have Their Radio Signals Blurred By Their Stars Solar Wind

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.