Paging Ellie Arroway

It looks like SETI@home is finally bearing some fruit. I say "finally" because I'm a fan of instant gratification, not because I believe the project is a failure if alien signals aren't picked up within 30 minutes of the project's launch. But anyway, it looks as if some very interesting signals have been picked up by the grass-roots sky-scanning initiative:

This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.

But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

I don't believe this is necessarily alien contact. It's a bit too oddball for that, I suspect, although the weakness of the signal and the frequency are curious if it is indeed natural. And the fact that it's not coming from an obvious star system. A dense, hydrogen-emitting body in a tight orbit around a massive brown dwarf is one possibility, with doppler shifting accounting for the frequency drift. Or not. It's just strange all around. It shall be fascinating to watch as this unfolds.

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