Stellar Space Weather Broadening Ultra-Narrow Signals: Implications for SETI Searches

To the point

A new study shows that turbulent plasma in a star’s wind can blur ultra-narrow radio signals from intelligent civilizations by spreading their power across many frequencies, making them harder to detect with Earth-based narrowband searches, and by calibrating this effect with solar-system measurements and applying it to different star types, researchers find that M-dwarf stars are especially prone to this broadening before the signal leaves the system, which suggests search strategies should stay sensitive to signals that aren’t razor-thin and account for space-weather effects as part of the search for techno-signatures.