Could these light pulses be alien messages?

CANADA: Tiny pulses of light from more than 200 distant stars may be messages from an alien civilisation, two Canadian astronomers have suggested.

The signals - if that is what they are - would have been sent thousands of years ago by an advanced civilisation to other solar systems that might support life, Ermanno Borra, of Laval University in Quebec, said.

The theory has been greeted with scepticism by fellow astronomers.

However, the research programme Breakthrough Listen, whose board includes Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, has directed a telescope at some of the stars noted by the astronomers in their paper.

Borra, who specialises in new forms of telescopes, published a paper in 2012 speculating on how aliens might use pulses to broadcast coded messages, or even pictures of themselves, to distant galaxies.

In the new paper, Borra describes identifying similar pulses of light layered over the beams from 234 stars, among 2.5 million recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has been mapping the sky since 2000.

Breakthrough Research said the pulses could have been caused by the instruments used to detect them. It categorised the paper as either negligible or insignificant but added: ‘‘If the signal were to be confirmed with another independent telescope, its significance would rise.’’

Peter Plavchan, a professor at the Missouri State University in Springfield, said: ‘‘In their paper they were very confident they had ruled everything else out. I don’t think that they had.’’